Storytelling School How Storytelling Can Turn Crowd Chaos into Connection
It’s my very first time at Comic-Con. I’m with my dear friend Denise, and it’s her first time, too. The second we arrive in downtown San Diego, we’re hit with a wave of everything - cosplayers everywhere, camera crews darting around, and volunteers all over the place. There are 135,000 people moving in every direction at once. It’s buzzing, massive, and honestly thrilling!
Since it’s Day One, we find our way to the convention center and step onto this long escalator. We’re heading up to the top, and I’m trying to act calm - for Denise, sure, but really for myself, too. Inside, my mind is racing: Are we in the right place? Did we come in the right entrance? Where do I get my badge? What should we do first? I don’t want to miss a thing!
That low-level panic kicks in because if we don’t figure this out fast, we’ll waste time and miss something amazing. Excitement and chaos collide, and my brain is ping-ponging:
Logistics
Priorities
Schedules
Locations
…all while I’m trying to look completely unfazed. The escalator keeps climbing, steep and endless.
Then we reach the top, and there he is standing right in the middle of all the noise and commotion: Alan Irwin. He makes eye contact, smiles, and says, “Welcome to Comic-Con!” That one sentence shifts everything. The noise is still there; the crowd hasn’t changed… but I have. I suddenly feel grounded. I know that we’re in the right place and that everything is going to be fine.
Alan didn’t give instructions or solve anything in that moment; his presence did all the work. In a sea of overstimulation, he connected with a simple smile and eye contact, and I thought: Of course. That’s why he’s here. Out of all the volunteers, they placed Alan at the top of the escalators. He goes beyond crowd management—he meets people where they are. He reads the energy and centers the entire room.
That’s crowd work at the highest level, and today, I have Alan Irwin on the Storytelling School Podcast so we can talk about exactly how he does this!
You’ll learn how simple eye contact can instantly shift someone’s entire state of mind, how powerful confidence can be (even when borrowed from a “character”), and so much more. We’ll also answer questions like: What makes storytelling the fastest path to building trust? Does true “crowd work” mean co-creating the experience with the audience? How is it that a speaker's resilience is measured not by avoiding mistakes but by how they recover from them? What could possibly be more essential than finding the joy or purpose in your own message before you even share it?
What you will learn in this episode:
- Why speakers borrow traits from admired figures, stepping into a “character” to project confidence
- How great speaking isn’t talking at people
- Why resilience matters more than perfection and how mistakes and technical failures are inevitable
- What about joy makes it the ultimate anchor
Who is Alan?
Storytelling has played a role in both of Alan Irwin’s careers in different ways. He recently retired from a career spent in the infrared industry as a senior software engineer by day. However, he stumbled into Improvisational Comedy in his 30s and by night has performed it for over 30 years, while also spending most of that time teaching Improv.
Improvisation has transformed Alan’s teaching. His secret weapon lies in his penchant for making complex subjects accessible and fun. It has served him well worldwide in speaking engagements on a wide range of other topics, from robotics to crisis intervention (including suicide prevention). He’s taken on the task of communicating very complex ideas to others in tech (and his interests, like geek culture and cheesemaking).
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