Remarks at the Certiport 2025 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships

I’m not here today to give you a pep talk. I don’t intend on spending this time on this platform to repeat a bunch of cliches and motivational quotes that you’ve heard a million times before.

Instead, I want to talk a little bit about technology and what it means to us as a species. I hope I can maybe change your outlook on why you’re here today.

Bill Gates once said that the computer was born to solve problems that didn’t exist before. It’s a tool. That’s what makes it so powerful—not just what it does, but what it enables.

It’s not just the computer itself that’s a tool, but the software on it, too. The computer was designed as a general piece of hardware that could adapt to lots of different software that tackled different use cases.

Some of the earliest and most important programs are the ones many of you are competing in today. Microsoft Word, Excel, and most notably PowerPoint — the one I competed in at the Certiport MOS National Championships back in 2017. I placed second—and I still think I might have done better had I even known the competition was a thing. That’s right—I got a perfect score and qualified for this on accident. Not to brag. I only came to compete after Certiport officials reached out to my teacher in a leap of faith because they couldn’t get ahold of me. I didn’t even know how to practice for this. I just showed up and figured it out as I went. I got a big check to take home to remember the occasion. I still have it. 

PowerPoint is probably the best at illustrating the concept I’m getting at—and it’s the one that’s most personal to me. Word and Excel are a little more straightforward. With Word, you’re creating a document that’s meant to be read from left to right, top to bottom. With Excel, you’re usually organizing some set of data and performing calculations. They have a very specific set of features and you’re creating something that stands on its own. It’s all right there.

PowerPoint is a little more abstract. It’s this giant canvas where you can put text, images, and shapes all over the place and make them move around. But unlike a Word document or an Excel sheet, a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t stand on its own. It’s called a presentation, after all. So, in this way, a PowerPoint is a prosthetic of the voice. It serves as a backdrop and a visual aid—a part of your production and personal branding when you’re making a pitch or presenting research. But it is nothing without a presenter to usher you through it.

I learned this inherently when I was about four years old. My parents were driving me to West Palm Beach to visit my grandparents and I was playing my favorite game, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, on my mom’s work laptop in the backseat. It used up a lot of power and I killed the battery on that thing in about half an hour.

After we stopped in a rest stop and got a car charger, my mom showed me a more energy efficient alternative—PowerPoint. She taught me about all the tools I could use and I got to work. I used the built in clip-art gallery to find representations of the people in my life and animated them walking around the white slides. I think I got up to more than 100 slides by the time the trip was done.

This isn’t the way PowerPoint is meant to be used. But it taught me the power of storytelling and the ways I could bend the rules of technology to bring the things I saw in my mind to the world.

These PowerPoint slides are the cave paintings for what I do today as a broadcaster in radio and television. I spent many years as an anchor for Morning Edition on WUFT-FM and for the five o’clock news on WUFT-TV.

A lot of people who knew me as a kid were surprised by my career choice. “I always thought you’d go into tech,” they’d say. The truth is there’s no such thing as working “in tech” anymore. Tech is not an industry. It’s a fact of life that exists across all disciplines. Even the smallest of businesses like family-owned restaurants have the ability to host online storefronts these days. If you’re not working in tech, no matter what your trade is—you’re being left behind.

My degree is actually in telecommunications and to me it’s the perfect representation of my interests. Of course I love technology—I never had any interest in coding. Telecommunications is all about using technology to tell stories, whether it’s the news, a documentary, or some kind of narrative. It’s the perfect blend of arts and technology.

I’ve been honored by the Florida Association of Broadcast Journalists for my anchoring, reporting and producing abilities. For those of you who don’t know what a producer does—in news—we basically choose what stories go in the show, in what order, and put together all the graphics and elements to tell a story. It’s not too dissimilar to putting together a PowerPoint. You align the stories in a grid that almost looks like an Excel sheet. You can write your story in each row, then attach the charts, videos, and banners to play in order.

All this is fed into some really complex machinery that plays it all out at the push of a button. It has always fascinated me, even though I’m supposed to be the guy who writes the stories. When I first started working in news, I’d spend extra time messing around with the software and equipment to see what it was capable of, beyond what I learned how to do from my official training. I’d come in to produce my show and have some bright idea of a new trick or visual transition I wanted to try every single day that would help tell a story.

Someone would always complain: “We don’t really do it that way here.”

I’d always say, “We do today.” And then we would. And as one of my professors would say—“nobody died.” It was never that big of a deal to dare to do something different. Life went on.

As a student of communications, I also read a lot of philosophical works about media. Works such as the seminal essay, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, where Langdon Winner explains how technology is a solution to a societal problem that reflects the worldview of its inventor. Or Marshall McLuhan, who famously said, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” 

My interest in these schools of thought brought me to the doors of Snap Inc., the developers of Snapchat, where I’m now a member of their Safety Advisory Board on the youth cohort. I work to answer these questions of what the role of media really is and how it affects us all to help them determine how to adapt their policies and features to make the platform safer and more secure—especially for young people.

I previously did some of the same work with Microsoft as part of its Council for Digital Good. Just one month after I competed here, I was one of fifteen teens selected from around the United States to fly out to their headquarters in Redmond to share insight with company officials on how bullying happens online and how we think they can help. They later flew me out to Washington D.C. to continue my work with them, where we met with First Lady Melania Trump to assist in her Be Best initiative to combat cyberbullying. We each got to give her our own mini-presentations. I showed her—you guessed it—a PowerPoint presentation.

Even though I learned these theories in a classroom, I truly first grasped them as a kid playing around with PowerPoint. And that’s why you’re here today. Of course you’re going to put this certification on your resume. My placement in this contest did a lot for me in that front—it inspired one of my high school teachers to ask me for assistance in designing a course with her on IT support. That’s right—I ended up being a student in a course I was working to design. This competition was one of the key qualifications I used to get into college, land my spots on tech boards, and more. These are all great, obvious benefits to being part of this competition. But if that’s all this is for—you’re missing out. I don’t think that’s why you’re here. You’ve come all the way to the World Championships. Many of you have spent a lot of money and time practicing on this. That’s a big, intentional choice you had to make.

This competition and certification is about uncovering the politics and philosophy of this software we all use on a daily basis. Most of these features you’ll probably never use in the real world—and you definitely will not use all of them in one single project. But that’s okay. Whenever I had a new idea of what I wanted to do to spice up my newscast with technology, I learned that you can’t use every trick in the book all the time. You have to use them when they benefit the story you’re trying to tell. This level of experimentation—finding the edge cases—reveals to you what the developers of the software had in mind about how it’s supposed to be used. By seeing all these tools and understanding why they’re there, you can then see what’s technically possible beyond the intended use case—and how you can combine features and break them to do something even more impressive.

But it goes beyond this individual software. Technologies are solutions to our world’s problems, and they contain a set of features to help solve those problems. For example, with PowerPoint—our teacher asks us to research a topic, we make a title slide, a couple slides with some bullets and images, and then we end off with our sources. And we all go along with this age-old tradition of making the same presentations over and over again.

But it’s important to remember that just because these features are there for a specific reason doesn’t mean we can’t use them for other purposes, too. If we stop viewing pieces of software as workflows and rather as a collection of features in our giant toolbox called the computer, we can be more resourceful and find new ways to solve our problems.

Steve Jobs once said that everything around you—all of these ways of life we think are laws or rules—it was all made up by people no smarter than you. We’ve just taken all these systems for granted and stopped asking ‘why.’ There was probably a good reason things are the way they are. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a better reason to do things differently today—and you can be the one who decides to do something differently. People will catch on.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from my words today it’s this: the only thing that’s constant is change. It wasn’t so long ago that our television came through a cable in the wall, our music came on shiny discs, and we had to go to the cinemas to see a film. Now it’s all on the internet, and the rules defining each of these forms of media, and when and where we could consume them, are falling apart. We have more flexibility today to create something exactly the way we envision it than ever before as we go from technologies designed for a purpose to more general-use technologies like AI chatbots. So if there was ever a time to stop following the rules—it’s now. Find what’s new and be the first to test it out. Try things. Smash things together. Push the limits. Do things the way they were meant to be done—not the way they were done before. You may just end up changing everything.