What If You Just Couldn't See Their Faces?
Marcus had rehearsed the speech 47 times, in his hotel room the night before, in the shower that morning, in the car on the way to the venue, and in the green room while his team adjusted the lighting on stage. He knew every word, every pause, every transition, every moment where he was supposed to smile and every moment where he was supposed to let the silence do the work. He had built this company from two people in a Lagos apartment to 340 employees across four countries, and this product launch was the moment that was supposed to prove all of it was worth something.
He walked out onto the stage and looked up.
And that was it. The faces got him. Hundreds of them, journalists, investors, partners, competitors, all of them staring directly at him with expressions he couldn't read, waiting for him to say something brilliant, and his brain, the same brain that had navigated board meetings and funding rounds and a global pandemic, went completely blank.
His heart was doing something alarming, his mouth had turned into something resembling dry cement, and the first sentence he'd rehearsed 47 times was just gone, like someone had walked into his head and switched off the lights.
He stood there for what felt like eleven years but was probably four seconds, and somehow got through it. But he told me afterwards that he'd have given anything in that moment to just not see their faces.
Here's something worth sitting with for a second. Public speaking is the most common human phobia, more common than the fear of death, more common than spiders or heights or enclosed spaces. About 75% of people experience it to some degree, and for a significant portion of those people it isn't just nerves, it's a genuine anxiety response that can derail careers, stall ambitions, and make talented people invisible in rooms where they deserve to be seen. And the reason is genuinely strange when you think about it.
Your brain cannot tell the difference between standing in front of an audience and being chased by something that wants to eat you. I'm not being dramatic, that's literally what's happening. The amygdala, the ancient alarm system buried deep in your brain, looks at a room full of staring human faces and files it under threat. It doesn't matter that you're wearing an expensive suit and holding a clicker, your limbic system thinks you're about to be attacked, so it does what it was designed to do, floods your body with adrenaline, tightens your muscles, dries your mouth, speeds up your heart, and prepares you to fight or run.
Neither of which is particularly useful when you're trying to launch a product to an international press room.
The solutions we've come up with over the centuries are honestly underwhelming given the scale of the problem. Practice more, breathe deeply, imagine the audience in their underwear, take beta blockers if you're really desperate. These aren't terrible suggestions exactly, but they're all asking the same thing, override your biology through willpower and preparation. And for a lot of people that works well enough, but for Marcus standing on that stage with his mind wiped clean, it wasn't enough, and it's never enough for the people who need it most.
So I've been thinking about a completely different approach.
What if you didn't have to override your biology at all, what if you just removed the trigger.
The trigger isn't public speaking, the trigger is faces. Specifically the experience of looking out at a crowd and seeing hundreds of pairs of human eyes staring back at you, unblinking, waiting, judging. That specific visual input is what tells your amygdala something is wrong, and if you take away that input, the alarm never goes off.
Here's what I'm proposing. A pair of AR glasses, augmented reality lenses that look and feel like regular eyewear, that does one specific thing when you put them on before stepping on stage. It converts every human face in your field of vision into a simple black silhouette, no eyes, no expressions, no judgment you can read or misread, just shapes, the same shapes you see in your peripheral vision when you're alone, familiar, non-threatening, safe.
The audience is still there, every single one of them, you're not speaking into an empty room, you can see their body language, their movement, whether they're engaged or quietly checking their phones. But the part of the visual information that your amygdala uses to trigger the threat response, the direct eye contact, the readable expressions, the sea of watching faces, that part is filtered out in real time by the lens.
Your rational brain stays in charge, the amygdala never gets the signal to panic, and Marcus gets to deliver the speech he spent 47 sessions rehearsing without his own biology sabotaging him at the worst possible moment.
The technology to build this isn't speculative. AR glasses already overlay digital information onto real world environments in real time, face detection and real time image processing already exist in consumer devices, and the silhouette conversion is essentially a computer vision filter applied through the lens as you see the world. The hardware exists, the software concept exists, what doesn't exist yet is someone combining them specifically for this purpose.
And the need is genuinely massive. About 20% of people quietly avoid career paths specifically because those paths require public speaking, that's one in five talented people editing their own ambitions because standing in front of a crowd feels like standing in front of something that wants to kill them.
Marcus eventually got through that launch, the product did well, but he told me he spent the next six months dreading the follow up presentation, and that dread cost him more energy than all 47 rehearsals combined.
He shouldn't have to choose between his fear and his ambition.
Neither should the other three billion people who feel exactly what he felt on that stage.
The faces are the problem, and we already have the technology to change what the faces look like.
We just haven't built it yet.
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