Writing for and about technology

Profile for The Georgia Straight, August, 2001

avid Chalk: Philosopher of gizmos

It’s a cloudy morning in July and it’s show time on the Chalk compound, a 27 acre estate hidden in the Fraser Valley. A winding driveway leads to a large home with several outbuildings, a duck pond and a swimming pool. Except for the Llamas cavorting in a fenced field, it’s a picture postcard of an early American farm. Designed by Chalk himself, the house has a cluttered charm. But it has a hidden agenda: it’s wired for taping professional Television shows, and even the outsize kitchen island was designed for that purpose. Chalk’s blonde wife Keely and his 18month old son, Luke, are somewhere in the house. Usually, Luke is kept away from the ‘hot set’ in the kitchen, but the producer tells me that once Luke toddled in, stopped and then stood quietly only a few feet away, watching his dad tape the show. Since balancing family and professional life is one of Chalk’s mantras, it’s a perfect example of how Chalk manages to integrate his personal, professional and philosophical life into an organic whole. Always totally goal oriented himself, he tells his audience about the importance of keeping goals ‘in front of you’. "If you can’t taste it, it won’t happen," he says.

The key ingredient in all of them is Chalk, wearing his trademark flannel shirt, friendly, relaxed but focused and organized. For each segment, there is a one page outline –a description of the item, one paragraph of background suggestions for Chalk and Mike Agerbo, who is Chalk’s co-host on the show-and that’s it. No script. No telepromptor. Each of the 3 takes is somewhat different because Chalk improvises on the basic ideas he wants to get across. That’s what keeps the show ‘fresh’. "I have to know what I’m talking about in depth, and in fact I’ve taken it apart and put it back together in my mind before I ever open my mouth," says Chalk. As for working without a script, there is a reason why he’s so good at speaking extemporaneously. But he’d rather not dwell on it. Agerbo, the company co-founder and COO, says he has problems with the no script, no prompter format, but gamely goes along with it. HE says they initially started doing infomercials to boost Doppler Industries sales. But right from the start they had this idea about empowering people with technology, he says. "The real reason why we are so much more than a company that does infomercials is Dave. Dave has this charisma, and it’s the secret ingredient of our success."

Chalk calls himself a ‘communicator and teacher’ and says he likes being a catalyst for positive change. To his fans, who send thousands of emails every day, "we love you, Dave," is typical, he’s a genuine guru. It’s not a word he would use. His favorite words are balance, positive attitude, challenge and creativity. Describing himself as being "almost totally right brain oriented’, his shows are models of how to uncomplicate a complex subject. A.J. Vickery, the executive producer of the show, says that the deliberately low key approach appeals to everybody from high techies to newbies and women. Almost 40percent of viewers are female. Unlike many people in the high tech industry, Chalk disdains the use of language the average person might not get. Chalk thinks that people who use jargon are doing it because they may not know how to simplify, or because it’s a power trip. "It’s totally unnecessary, all those jargony words are simply the icing on the cake. I’m interested in taking things apart so I can re-assemble them in bite size pieces so people get it—that’s what makes me feel good." Linguists who have studied the effects of words on culture say that indeed, there is power in how words are used. SFU Associate Professor Juan Sosa, Ph.D. says jargon is often used to exclude others. "Take pig Latin, for example, it was devised to keep those outside your group from understanding what you were saying. Language can be used to define in and out groups, and there is no doubt that even tone of voice indicates how you rank in the pecking order." Jargon aside, Chalk does use technical terminology—a USB port is called by its proper name---but he doesn’t revel in unnecessary techie talk. "Our audience is general, but many have watched our show for years, so for them we could actually do a faster and more technical show. Our challenge is always to be inclusive so everybody gets it," he says. Chalk uses the KISS philosophy---which means ‘keep it simple, stupid’. Not that he would ever call anyone stupid. He knows what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by words. In fact, words, especially the spoken kind, used to be his enemy. Until the age of 14, he suffered from an inability to pronounce certain sounds, like the ch in his own name.

"It was so bad I begged my parents to allow me to change my name," he remembers. Reading aloud in class was torture. Desperate, he was considering an operation on his jaw. Besides his, his grades were mediocre. Not surprisingly, he was beset by negative feelings. His background is middle class, and as the son of a brilliant electrical engineer who liked to invent things, he was expected to do well. It was his mother who believed in him, and always told him that he could be whatever he wanted to be. She encouraged him to do something about his problems. At the age of 14, he started seeing a speech pathologist, and several psychologists.

A year later, he was a different person---for the first time in his life, he spoke fluently, and like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, he began to soar. Literally. He had always dreamed of becoming a pilot, and at 19, he became the youngest commercially licensed pilot in Canada. He flew into remote places in northern BC, living his dream. But he got bored with it. "I lock onto something, do it, and then move on," he says, though he still builds model airplanes in his meticulous workshop next to the main house. A stint at UBC, studying engineering was next. It soon became clear that he couldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps. He left UBC after a year, asking himself if he was a quitter.

The answer came soon after he had left for a trip around the world. To make some money, he ended up cleaning the sludge off a 10 foot gear wheel in an Australian gold mine. Unlike several people before him he stuck it out until it was done. He was hired. Within a week, he had some new ideas, and within 3 weeks, they offered him the job of foreman, with a car and a house. Barely 21, he says it taught him something crucial. "I discovered that I could go out in the world, and explore possibilities. I discovered that I could do whatever I wanted." It was that experience and overcoming his speech problems that made him into the unrelenting optimist he is today.

It’s a philosophy he not only lives by but teaches to others. Almost every month, he spends a couple of hours talking to school kids, grade 7 students making the transition to high school and senior high school students worried about what lies beyond high school. "It makes me feel good to be able to tell the kids that they don’t have to have all the answers to life’s questions, and that it’s OK not to know what you want to do with the rest of your life, and perhaps make a difference" he says. He gets ‘amazing feedback’ from students who write and even some who call to ask for further encouragement. He doesn’t hold back about his early problems, either. "I tell them that I’m taking a risk by talking about my speech problems, and that it’s only for their ears, not the street," he says. While he does not charge for these inspirational talks, corporations and even foreign governments are happy to shell out anywhere between 3 to 10,000 dollars for an evening with Chalk.

Like his taped shows, Chalk does his speeches ‘live’, without benefit of visible aids like power point. "I try to get the audience to visualize things inside their heads, and I find that giving them graphics tends to make them lazy." Far from dismissing his early speech problems, Chalk acknowledges that it was the necessity of overcoming them that made him the fluent speaker he is today. "I knew I couldn’t say certain sounds, so I got into the habit of thinking several sentences ahead, and formulating them so I wouldn’t have to say those sounds." Thinking and speaking at the same time became an ingrained habit. He describes the process: "While the words are coming out of my mouth, my mind is already ahead, thinking of what to say next," he says. Toastmasters, the world’s largest non profit organization devoted to teaching the art of public speaking, knew a problem when they saw one. "They took me aside after my first speech, and asked me to please not come back because I might have a negative impact on all the people who had spent weeks, sometimes months, to prepare their first speech."

Whether talking to students or explaining gizmos, Chalk continues to use non technical terms as much as possible. In a recent interview with the newspaper, Silicon Valley North, he said that he would like to do away with the word "techNOLOGY" altogether. "The word technology always seems to be used to describe things we don't understand. The telephone used to be considered a piece of technology and so did the television. As long as we call it technology, we are by definition inferring we don't understand it. In 20 years, no one will call a digital camera or a PDA a piece of technology. " Indeed, if Chalk has anything to do with it, techno fear and the very word will disappear altogether.