Public speaking well is hard. Most are not good at it, myself included.

That said, I'll take a poor speaker (Musk, older Carmack) over a PR drone any day.

I remember he said he had some kind of training on how to deal with the "hmmm" and it got better, but the "aye" remains.

(Not complaining, I loved his talks before with all "hmmms" and still do, "aye" and all)

It's an engineer thing. Like Scotty from ST:TOS.

It's not like people go home and talk to their partners about vertex shaders for a half hour.

Granted I've watched every QuakeCon keynote that was posted and enjoyed them all (along with reading every .plan). His enthusiasm is infectious. Yet even then he is breaking it down to the big things that happened that year, not the day-to-day stuff.

If it were over the dinner table every night, I'd probably lose my mind.

This has reminded me that I used to have the same tick.

I was mocked a bit because of it in middle school and set on to remove it.

it took a conscious effort at first but I have not thought about this tick since that time.