The Case for Making Your Audience Uncomfortable (In a Good Way)

I want to tell you about a poem I wrote that you had to destroy to read.

I cast it in plaster and covered it in spray paint. You had to scrape away the slab to read the words, but in doing so you'd also risk gouging the object the words were embossed onto. After a week in a gallery, the full poem had been revealed - but the object was also scraped so deeply in some places that not all of the words were even readable.

People hated it. Or rather—they hated the part where they had to make the choice to destroy something in order to get what it contained. They stalled. They hesitated. Some of them tried to read the surface words fast enough that they wouldn't have to follow the instructions at all.

That hesitation was the whole point.

Why I started making poems that couldn't be read passively

For most of my early career as a poet, I operated within the traditional model: write words, arrange them on a page, share them with a reader or an audience, move on. It's a model that's worked for thousands of years. I have no complaints about it. But at some point—somewhere in the collision between my years at Stanford and Google and my nights performing at open mics—I started asking a question that wouldn't leave me alone:

What if the experience of encountering a poem changed what the poem meant?

Not just the words. The experience. The physical act of holding something, choosing something, doing something. What if the form carried meaning that language alone couldn't?

The destroy-to-read poem was one experiment. Another was a poem I disguised as a series of computer journal entries—readers didn't know it was a poem at all. They discovered it the way you'd stumble onto a secret. And then there was the poem that took me to the Philippines: I gave a complete stranger an hour's notice and flew them across the world to encounter a piece of work in person, in a specific place, because the location was part of the poem. You couldn't get the full meaning from a screen. You had to be there.

Each of these experiments confirmed something I was starting to believe: people remember what they felt and what they did, not what they heard.

What an experiential keynote actually is

The term "experiential keynote" gets used loosely, so let me be specific about what I mean—and what I don't mean.

A traditional keynote is a talk. One person at a microphone, sharing ideas, telling stories, making arguments. It's valuable. I've sat through traditional keynotes that changed how I think. But the relationship between speaker and audience is essentially one-directional. Information flows one way. The audience receives.

A workshop is participatory by design—small groups, structured exercises, facilitated conversation. The audience produces. The limitation is that workshops typically sacrifice the narrative arc and emotional resonance that a great keynote creates.

An experiential keynote tries to do both. It preserves the narrative structure—there's a story being told, an argument being built—but it creates moments where the audience isn't just listening. They're doing something. Making a choice. Responding to a prompt. Creating something with their hands or their phones or the person sitting next to them. The boundary between speaker and audience becomes permeable.

Entertainment is a separate category. A magician, a comedian, a musical performance—these create an experience, but they're not trying to shift professional behavior or organizational culture. Experiential keynotes are purpose-built to produce lasting change, not just lasting memories. (Although the memories help.)

What I actually do on stage

I should be concrete about this, because "experiential" can mean anything from mildly interactive Q&A to full-scale audience performance art. Here's what a typical engagement looks like for me.

I open with a poem. Not as decoration or warm-up—the poem is structural. It introduces the central idea of the talk in a form that bypasses the analytical brain and hits somewhere deeper. People respond to it before they've decided whether to agree with it.

From there, I move between storytelling—the Silicon Valley years, the art experiments, the moments where those worlds collided—and live demonstrations. I create things on stage. I use the audience's phones as part of the experience. I give people small, specific challenges that require them to actually try something rather than just think about it. At a recent event, every person in the room wrote something and destroyed it. The act of destroying your own work—on purpose, in public—teaches something about creative risk that no amount of explaining can.

The goal is that by the end, the audience has experienced the principles, not just heard about them. "Write By Erasing" isn't an abstract concept after you've actually done it. "Aim for the Trash Can" means something different once you've aimed at one.

Why this is becoming the default expectation, not the exception

There's a practical reason experiential formats are gaining ground: attention is harder to hold than it used to be. A room full of people in 2026 contains individuals who are accustomed to consuming information in very short bursts, on their own schedule, with infinite competing stimuli available at their fingertips. A forty-five-minute one-directional talk has to work harder than ever to justify why this content couldn't have been a newsletter.

But there's also a deeper reason. People are tired of leaving events having been informed and not changed. The conference circuit has produced a generation of audience members who can spot a forgettable talk in the first three minutes. They know when someone is just going through the motions, and they've gotten very good at mentally checking out while physically remaining in their seats.

When something genuinely requires their participation—when there's a moment they can't just observe, they have to choose—it wakes them up in a way that polished slide decks can't. Discomfort, used well, is a gift. It says: this moment requires something of you. Pay attention.

That's not a new idea. Theater has known it for centuries. Immersive art installations know it. What's new is applying it deliberately to the keynote stage.

Questions I get asked about experiential keynotes

What exactly is an experiential keynote speaker? Someone who builds interactive, participatory moments into a keynote format—so the audience isn't just watching, they're doing. The defining feature is that the content can't be fully delivered through passive listening alone. Part of the meaning is created by the audience themselves.

How is it different from a workshop? A workshop is primarily participatory—structured exercises, breakout groups, facilitated outputs. An experiential keynote has a primary narrative arc delivered by the speaker, with participatory moments woven in. Think of it as: the workshop makes the room do the work; the experiential keynote gives the room something to respond to, and the response becomes part of the experience.

What kinds of events benefit most from this format? Events where behavior change is the actual goal—not just inspiration or information transfer. Leadership summits, sales kickoffs, culture-building retreats, innovation offsites. Also events where the audience has seen everything before and needs something that will actually cut through. Experiential formats work less well for very large, logistically complex settings where participation becomes hard to manage, though I've made it work with audiences well into the hundreds.

Does an experiential keynote cost more than a traditional one? The investment varies by speaker and scope, not necessarily by format. What costs more is the pre-event work—understanding your specific audience, customizing the interactive elements, preparing materials that tie the experience to your organization's actual challenges. That investment in customization is where the real value is, and it applies to any format. A generic experiential keynote is just a different kind of generic.

Can this work for large audiences—500 or more people? Yes, with thoughtful design. Phone-based participation scales extremely well. Structured individual writing exercises scale well. Small-group breakout moments within a larger room can work. What doesn't scale is anything requiring individual vulnerability in front of strangers—that's better suited to smaller settings where trust is already present. I design the interactive elements based on audience size from the start, not as an afterthought.

Back to the poem you had to destroy

Here's what I noticed every time I gave someone that poem: the ones who hesitated longest—who really struggled with the decision to run it under the tap—remembered the experience most vividly. Not the words. The decision.

That's the thing about discomfort. When you metabolize it rather than avoid it, it leaves a mark. You remember the moment you chose to do the hard thing. You remember what you found on the other side.

The best keynotes work the same way. They don't ask your audience to sit back and absorb. They ask them to step forward and choose.

If your next event needs that kind of experience, let's talk about what that could look like.