Matt and Alper go into some tips for dealing with “Zoom latency” — the tendency of videoconferencing software to interrupt the way we humans interact.

Episode transcript:

Matt Krause
Alper, as you know, I’m kind of a geek, surprise, surprise, right?

Alper Rozanes
Surprise, surprise, indeed, yeah.

Matt Krause
So one of the blogs that I’ve been reading for a decade now. It’s called Marginal Revolution. Marginalrevolution.com. It’s an economics blog. But the guy he writes, about 10 years ago, he was writing about economics pretty much all the time. But now that he’s been doing it for 10 years, he probably only writes about economics, you know, a third of the time and the rest of the time he’s writing about something else.

Matt Krause
So a couple days ago, or, yeah, a couple days ago, or a couple of weeks ago or something like that. I saw a blog post that he posted, it was called How to Talk on Zoom. And he was discussing a study that he had read. And I’m going to read the results of the study. But don’t worry, you know, I don’t want to make this too boring. So I’m not gonna read, you know, the whole study, I’m just gonna read the first paragraph of results.

Alper Rozanes
Just remember, not every single person out there is as geeky as us. So keep them in mind as well.

Matt Krause
Okay, so I’ll just stick to the first paragraph. So here’s the first paragraph he says he’s talking about how to talk on Zoom.And he says, In a study last year, people who were face to face responded to yes, no questions in 297 milliseconds on average. While those on Zoom chats took 976 milliseconds, so in other words, about three times as long.

Matt Krause
And then he mentioned conversational turns handing the mic back and forth between speakers as it were exhibited similar delays.

Matt Krause
The researchers hypothesize that something about the scant 30 to 70 millisecond delay in Zoom audio, disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags…

Matt Krause
By the way, I love that, his use of that word, meatbags.

Matt Krause
So the the delay, yeah, this delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another. That’s the magic, that magic that creates true dialogue.

Matt Krause
So that was the that was the summary of the results. And I thought about that a little bit. And I thought, okay, Zoom has become extremely popular over zoom and other video conferencing platforms. A lot of the time it’s zoom, sometimes. I think it’s what is it Microsoft Teams or something like that. And there are some people out there who use like Google Meet or something like that.

Matt Krause
So over the past couple years, video conferencing platforms have become very popular. I think. People use Zoom a lot. Some people use Microsoft Teams, I see some people, they’re using Google Meet, I think they’re there, I’m sure that there are a few stragglers out there who are using other things.

Matt Krause
So anyway, video conferencing in general has become extremely popular over the past couple of years. And so let’s give people today a couple of tips on overcoming this latency problem and one of my favorites for overcoming the latency problem. And I guess it’s not really a suggestion for overcoming the latency problem it’s just a suggestion for what to do with it.

Matt Krause
And that is to stand up Stand up while you’re speaking. And I’ve run into the suggestion a number of times before but most recently, it came up because of one of the public speaking groups that I’m involved with. Somebody suggested that when people are giving their pitches that they stand up to give them and, and not as in stand up so that people can see you know, your full standing body, but just stand up. So still is still face and upper torso, but you’re standing while you’re speaking.

Matt Krause
And it does, it totally makes a difference. It makes a difference in the your breathing technique. It makes a difference in how lively your face looks. It makes a difference in your ability to use your hands when you’re speaking stuff like that.

Matt Krause
So that’s one tip that I would have is stand up while you’re speaking. And what about you? What advice would you give to people? You were I think before the podcast, you mentioned something like putting yourself in the slides. And I was wondering what is what does Alper mean by that?

Alper Rozanes
Well, I was thinking about the term that you used to mean to prevent a latency, and I understand that you weren’t talking about the technical details of like reducing that time, but you’re actually talking about connecting better with the with the audience, right? In online meeting?

Matt Krause
Yeah. Yeah, correct.

Alper Rozanes
And in that regard, I think one of the best ways of doing that, especially if you’re presenting I’m not talking about, you’re in a Zoom meeting, your camera is on and you’re talking to people.

Alper Rozanes
But let’s say you’re in a Zoom meeting, and you’re presenting, we are using, you’re using your presentation. So you’re using screen sharing, in that, in that sense, my number one tip would be, if you’re using PowerPoint to insert your video feed directly onto the slides using this recently added feature called the CAMEO.

Alper Rozanes
What it does is it takes your camera feeds, and you can insert it into your slides. And when you go to the presentation mode, your camera and your self is actually now visible with the with the slide content simultaneously, not side by side, integrated one on one on top of the other. What this does is prevents you becoming this stamp sized, miniscule person on the side of the screen, when most of the real estate screen estate is given to the slide itself.

Alper Rozanes
It wouldn’t technically reduce the latency, but I think it would increase your eye contact and your your connection with the audience so much that it will automatically help you achieve better communication with them. So I think it’s one of the indispensable tools that should be used from now on in every single presentation. Again, not zoom meetings where you just speak into the camera, but in zoom or other online meetings, where you use presentations, where you show slides, and you become part of it.

Matt Krause
So I have a question for you. So does using this technique that you’re describing require that you be sharing a slide, is that correct?

Alper Rozanes
Yes. Yes, we’re talking about sharing your presentation. Yep.

Matt Krause
So you would not be able to use this technique, when you are just playing talking head, you know, to Talking Heads, having conversation on Zoom.

Alper Rozanes
You wouldn’t need that. Because when you don’t do screen sharing you’re actual full screen anyway. Oh, so this is only in situations where you start sharing your screen and you become this small person at the side, top corner of the screen, and people can disconnect from you.

Matt Krause
Okay. And I have another theory, and you tell me what you think about it.

Matt Krause
I think that I mean, it’s absolutely true. That talking on video conferencing, there is this latency. It’s it’s true, I’m not going to say that that latency does not exist.

Matt Krause
You know, when you’re sitting in front of somebody in real life, you get to have this back and forth conversation, where you say blah, blah, blah, and they you know, interrupt you with just a you know, an or, you know, ah, that’s interesting or something like that, and you keep talking and and the conversation is nice and the conversation seems to flow well.

Matt Krause
And then when you try that on Zoom, you know, you end up here, like, you know, utter something, some unintelligible thing like, and then and then the other person mutters an, and then you both look at each other.

Matt Krause
And you’re like, and all of a sudden you get polite and you’re like, Okay, you go ahead. No, no, you go ahead. No, you go ahead. No, you go ahead. And then there’s this uncomfortable moment silence. And then both people start talking…

Matt Krause
So it’s just a bad scene. And one thing that, so zoom creates that situation. And it’s, it’s virtually impossible to get over that situation to get past that situation, or to correct for that situation.

Matt Krause
But one thing that Zoom is really good at is if you stop playing this try to overcome latency game, you’re kind of forced into this position of just listening to stuff, and you have to listen to somebody’s whole. Well, I mean, you know, in a in a, let’s say that you’re having a real life conversation, you know, over a cup of coffee or something with somebody at Starbucks or something. They say something, and if what they say it’s taking you off in some other direction, you get a chance to interrupt them and you have a bunch of tools at your disposal to make it rude or less rude or friendly even. And so all of a sudden, you get to drive the conversation off in your direction, whereas with Zoom because of this latency issue, because you can’t do that as well or as smoothly in zoom, you just kind of have to sit there and listen to them.

Matt Krause
And, and so you get to hear them push out their entire thought. And, and then there’s a moment of silence, where you’re just kind of waiting to see if they finished speaking. And then with the person having spoken their entire thought they, they feel like wow, this person is really listening to me.

Alper Rozanes
There is no way of knowing that for sure.

Matt Krause
Yeah, that’s true, there is no way of knowing that for sure.

Matt Krause
But a conversation on Zoom gives you this listening opportunity, it kind of forces you into this listening opportunity of listening to the person’s full thought that you can easily avoid. And by human nature, we tend to want to avoid it anyway, in real life, or as as this guy, this marginal revolution guy would put it in meatspace.

Matt Krause
In meatspace, it’s so easy to hijack the conversation and steer in your own direction, but because of this latency issue in zoom, it’s not.

Matt Krause
And so you’re just kind of forced into this position of listening to the full thought, which is kind of a new thing, you know, very few people have the opportunity to speak their whole thought, without having their words hijacked and taken off in some other direction.

Matt Krause
So that’s what I wanted to suggest was that it’s great to try to overcome the latency issue. And you could spend the rest of your life if you wanted, practicing techniques for overcoming the latency issue. But if you just give in to the latency issue, and stop trying to fight it, and realize that you’re never going to overcome this latency issue, but this issue is opening up other areas to you that are not so easily available, then suddenly, a zoom conversation becomes much more fruitful than one over over a Starbucks coffee, for example, a meatspace conversation.

Matt Krause
So that’s what I wanted to suggest. What do you think about that?

Alper Rozanes
Actually, before I go into that I wanted to pick your brain. Had you found yourself in situations where there was this big or small latency? And how did you deal with that?

Matt Krause
By listening to the thought, and then by listening to the other person’s full thought, and then sitting through that uncomfortable silence, and it might only last for a second or two, but just sitting through that uncomfortable silence, and becoming comfortable with the, with the silence.

Matt Krause
In a meatspace conversation, that silence tends to not exist. But I found that in, in having these zoom conversations, and by being forced to sit there and listen to the full thought, sometimes at the end of the thought, there are some amazing things that come out.

Matt Krause
And I end up thinking, wow, you know, if this was a meatspace conversation, like over a cup of coffee, or something, I wouldn’t have heard what came out in the second half there.

Alper Rozanes
Do you remember how many people were in the meeting the online meeting, for example? Is it you? So it was just another person or…

Matt Krause
It was just one on one.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, because that latency, again, not the technical part, but that latency. 900 milliseconds is nothing when compared to the latency of speaking to the latency in the meetings, like one to many. So you throw this question out to the audience, there are six, seven, ten, twelve people in front of you. And there is absolute silence, there is dead silence. So we’re not talking about 900. We’re talking about maybe 5000 milliseconds at that moment, if someone picks up the microphone and responds to you.

Matt Krause
By the way, before we wrap up for the day, that brings up another question my mind about the the microphones and stuff and the five seconds of silence.

Matt Krause
That would be kind of uncomfortable. Because if there’s a microphone being passed around you as a speaker, you get to have an excuse that excuse for these, five seconds of silence is that somebody is walking the microphone over to this person on the other side of the room. So you have an excuse for this…

Matt Krause
But if there isn’t a microphone, you still have the five seconds of silence but it’s it’s kind of uncomfortable, isn’t it? What do you do with that time? What do you do with that time?

Alper Rozanes
It is, actually very it was the worst some of the most uncomfortable experiences in my life. That’s especially when when they can when the cameras are off and you’re just looking looking at screen names or their initials. If you’re using Teams.

Alper Rozanes
You throw this question into the into the air and it’s not picked up one second, One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, and like several seconds later you hear someone out of sheer courtesy, unmute themselves, you hear them sigh and say, yes.

Alper Rozanes
That’s what I do now is I tried to completely prevent those situations. So I don’t I don’t throw open ended questions into the air, especially if I’m speaking one to many. I try not to do that. Because I think it’s normal that other people are waiting on other people to respond and if everybody’s waiting for everyone else we’ll just keep staring into each other or worse keeps their To get to their screen names.

Matt Krause
I’ve experienced that a couple times, by the way, and I hate that too. The the five seconds, the five uncomfortable seconds of silence. And then finally somebody unmute themselves. And all they say is yes.

Alper Rozanes
You hear it in the tone. You hear the tone saying, Look, this is painful. I’m just going to throw you a lifeline and just…

Matt Krause
Okay, so that’s about it for today. So, thank you very much Alper, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Alper Rozanes
Take care. Bye bye.