Somehow this was the top request in my recent survey about “what should I blog next?”

So … One time in about 2006 or so in Niagara Falls, Al Gore introduced me to a billionaire - Jim Pattison.

I suppose I should include a few more details.

The People

Al Gore

You might remember the 45th Vice President of the United States who also wrote a book, An Inconvenient Truth, later turned into an Academy-Award-nominated documentary.

After running for President, he became a popular after-dinner speaker talking about climate change, and often introducing himself as “I used to be the next president of the United States.”

He also spent 21 years on Apple’s board of directors.

Jim Pattison

Very successful Canadian businessman from Vancouver. His Jim Pattison Group started out with car dealerships, branching out into media, entertainment, and more, and even Ripley’s Believe it or Not, which operates the aquarium in Toronto and also a corny museum in Niagara Falls.

Pattison Group is particularly big in billboard advertising. You can see their billboards all across Canada.

Me

What do I have to do with any of this? Well, Apple’s field engineers would occasionally get a message saying that “a member of the Board of Directors” was going to be giving a talk in our area, and would like to have someone from Apple on hand to help out with the tech setup.

We all knew it was Al Gore, and one time we got the note that he’d be speaking in Niagara Falls, and I enthusiastically volunteered to help out at what turned out to be an annual sales meeting of the Jim Pattison Group. They’d lined up Al Gore as the after dinner speaker.

so I head to Niagara Falls

I had chatted ahead of time with Al’s assistant. What do I need to bring? He’s going to be using Keynote to present from his MacBook, of course. Do you have all the cables you need for the projector? Do you HAVE a projector? What about the Internet? Have you got an extension cord?

She was very nice and replied basically, “not to worry, Al travels with everything, just bring yourself and enjoy the dinner.”

Oooooh. I get dinner too? That’s cool.

Naturally I took three or four of every possible Mac and cable and adaptor and a projector, just in case. I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t have backup.

None of this turned out to be needed.

I did learn that he lived dangerously and didn’t actually travel with a backup copy of the presentation and that one time, he’d had to re-download it from somewhere at the last minute which, given early 2000s internet speeds, pushed his speech from “before dinner” to “after dinner.” I suggested to his assistant that since he also travelled with an iPod, which could act as an external disk to your Mac, that perhaps he could just keep a backup copy of the Keynote slides on there. She seemed to think this was a good idea.

We checked out the setup, everything was fine.

presentation tips from Al Gore

Al did one clever thing that impressed me. His first slide was black - and we’d get the projector all set up ahead of time, and leave it showing the black slide, projecting nothingness on the screen all throughout dinner, so that the moment he started to talk and pressed his Keynote remote, boom - there’s the main title slide, all ready to go, no futzing around.

That is some pro presenter stuff right there.

the dinner

The event turned out to be a gathering of the Pattison Group’s top sales people for their annual awards banquet, and Al Gore was the invited post-dinner speaker.

Before dinner, they’d lined up a professional photographer, and each of the sales people had a chance for a quick one-on-one chat with Al, and the photographer would snap a quality portrait.

I had brought my own pocket camera along - this event was so long ago that whatever phone it was you had, it sure didn’t have a good camera - and I asked the assistant if she could possibly take a quick shot of me and Al.

“Oh, let’s not do that, just get in line with everybody else! We’ll get the photographer to take a good photo and we’ll send it to you.”

um, ok.

get in line

so I joined the end of the line of Sales Achievers, who were all inching towards the front, where Jim Pattison would introduce them to Al Gore. Jim would probably say something like “Al, this is Dave, he’s our top billboard salesman in all of Alberta” and they’d all smile and the photographer would snap the ceremonial photo.

I’m last.

I get up to the front, and I remember the look of confusion on Jim Pattison’s face. “Who the hell is this guy?”, he was no doubt thinking, looking around for security.

I introduce myself quickly. “Mr. Gore, Mr. Pattison, hello, I’m Steve, I’m the local Apple engineer and I just wanted to say hi and make sure everything’s OK with your setup.”

Al IMMEDIATELY takes over.

“Steve, it’s great to see you, thanks for coming," Al Gore, the former future president of the United States, says to me. And he turns to billionaire Jim Pattison and says “Jim, this is Steve. You might not know this but I’m on Apple’s board of directors and one of the perks of that is that when I travel, I’m lucky to have Apple people like Steve on hand to help out."

The photographer then snaps this picture, which they kindly printed off and mailed to me in a nice frame a week later.

Still one of my favourites.

Thank you Al Gore, and thank you Jim Pattison for this really cool opportunity.

more presentation tips from a master

I did the same volunteer thing a few months later in London, where Al was speaking to a much larger group of hospital execs or something. Once again, I had a car full of backup supplies, none of which were needed, fortunately.

He mesmerized the crowd, again, and it was particularly interesting seeing him deliver this talk a second time. He made it all fresh, and what seemed to be off-the-cuff improvised remarks were repeated again but in a totally sincere way. And he started off by referencing something that had been in the paper that day, and connected it to the hospital’s mission.

Personalizing the talk to the audience. That was huge.

I also particularly remember he used a little Keynote effect on one of the slides, and then said “You know, I really like that transition. I’m going to hit the back button, let’s do it again.”

(For my Apple friends, he’s referring to the Anvil build, where a shape drops down with a colossal thud, kicking up dust as it lands.)

Al followed this with a little anecdote about how he’s on the Apple board, and he heard this effect was going to be removed, so he pulled some strings with Steve Jobs to make sure it stayed in. And then he did it again. And everybody laughed, as if this was a totally off the cuff joke just for them, even though he’d told the exact same story in Niagara Falls earlier, and probably hundreds of other times.

It was a great talk and I learned a lot about presenting and connecting with the audience from having seen it delivered twice.

In future years I wound up giving an iPhone Programming presentation hundreds of times and I really appreciated seeing how Al Gore could take the same content and make it seem fresh, with some little tweaks every time for the audience, coupled with jokes and asides that were maybe a little more rehearsed than you thought.

surprise appearance of a famous politician and my dad.

This time in London, there was a huge crowd and no real opportunity for me to say hello again, so I just watched from the back.

Where I happened to bump in to Elizabeth May, noted Canadian politician, and leader of Canada’s Green Party.

She had recently run in a by-election in London, and my Dad had been very impressed with her and actually hosted a gathering at our local church at which she spoke.

I said to her, “My father thinks very highly of you.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful. Who’s your father?” Elizabeth May says to me.

“Bob Hayman.”

“Bob’s your father?”, she asks very excitedly. “He’s wonderful! Tell him I said hello!”

and that to this day is the only Canadian political leader who’s ever given me a hug.