F-Bombs, CEOs, and Teleprompters: Keeping It Real in the Pre-Artificial Age

July 29, 2025

“Hey Colin,” the CEO looked up and called out. “NO F***ING TELEPROMPTERS.”

Yikes. As a young event director, I’d just arrived at the hotel where our big global event was to be held in three days, and this was my welcome as I crossed the ballroom, approaching a table near the partially-built stage where he and a few staff members were sitting and chatting in the otherwise empty space.

“No sir,” I replied. “No f***ing teleprompters.”

“Good. I just wanted to put that in language you’re sure to understand.”

This was going to be a fun week.

I wasn’t surprised by the blunt warning, actually—not because it came from a naturally demanding executive, but because of a misfire that still stung several months after our prior event: For his introduction of the CEO, the company president had asked for a brief script to be put in the teleprompter.

I’d written the script, gotten the president’s approval, and he’d delivered it, setting up a smooth, engaging address by the CEO. All good, right?

Wrong.

It wasn’t until the event was over that I learned of the CEO’s outrage that his intro had been scripted and readrather than delivered in plain-spoken language—“from the heart,” we’d say—by his close colleague and friend, not to mention a key member of his executive team.

It didn’t matter how good or bad the script was. It was the fact that a script was needed at all.

Hey, self-defensive me might say, I was just following instructions….

But I should have known better, even amid the rush and pressure of pre-event mode.

Top takeaway, for the president and for me: Some messages—even the most important ones, to the largest audiences—don’t need to be perfect. They need to be real.

Why is this memory raising its pointed finger now? Well, all these years (and dozens of events and hundreds of speeches) later, here we are in the Artificial Age, when writing is easily refined by robots. In seconds, our raw, rambling words can be prompted and polished into immaculate iterations that glow with grammatical perfection, pristine cadence, and flawless phrasing.

 But here’s the thing about our raw words, whether they’re spoken from a stage or scrolled through on a screen: They’re human. They’re alive. They’re us. And in their scrappy sincerity, their imperfection makes them even more, well, perfect.

In food photography (another battleground of art vs. artifice), photographers know that the most mouthwatering images aren’t the ones where everything’s neat and tidy. What makes us drool and our stomachs growl? The messy parts: The oozing cheese. The crumbling crust. The dripping blueberry filling. Images so vivid, so tangible, so gooey, we almost want to scoop them up with our fingers and stick them in our mouths. Why? Because that’s what real food looks like.

Writing isn’t much different—we’re just capturing images and ideas in a different way. And while no pro wants to sound sloppy, even in a time when “fake” can be nearly impossible to detect, we shouldn’t—we can’t—make “polished and fast” more valuable than “real and resonant.” After all, our audiences, at least most of the time, are still humans.

So, do your messages make mouths water?

Do they make your audience chuckle with a “yep, that’s me!” or shake their heads with a “that’s so true!”?

Do they transmit your heartbeat—the rhythm of your own experiences, memories, and purpose—into the hearts of others?

Let’s not write just to populate the prompter, fill the space, or meet the deadline.

Let’s write to make our audience feel.

Let’s write the real.

Any good CEO would agree.