Welcome to my TED Talk
Hello, I hope that your weekend was great.
I spent the past week at TED gearing up for my talk and delivering it – the topic was America’s political system, what is going wrong, and how we can improve it.
For those of you who don’t know much about TED, it’s a conference that convenes a host of thinkers in technology, science and culture. The videos from people’s talks are widely circulated – it has 24 million subscribers on YouTube for example. A realistic expectation of the number of people who will wind up seeing this talk is probably 1 to 3 million, with a possibility of it being significantly higher - some talks get up to 6 million+ views.
I’ve spoken on America’s political system any number of times and feel very comfortable with the subject matter. But having a tailored talk with slides on a tight time frame still required some thought and work. The TED team asks that you rehearse and present to them multiple times in the run up to the conference. The venue holds about 1,700 people, and there’s one ‘take.’ So you definitely feel some pressure. Evelyn flew out to join me for the occasion – she’s never attended TED so it’s new to her.
The night before reminded me a little bit of a night before a presidential debate, where it’s tough to get to sleep. I woke up thinking, “Today’s the day!” I was eager to hit the message.
Backstage was restless. Scott Galloway was up after me, so we shared some time together. I heard my name called and bounded to the stage.
I’m glad to say the talk went great. The feedback was phenomenal. I got a standing ovation. People came up to me afterward to congratulate me. I definitely opened some eyes and minds to a different approach to the problems that ail us. One person said to me afterwards, “Thank you. I feel like the future of civilization may rest on whether your efforts succeed.” Others asked, “How can I help?” It felt awesome to deliver on what I knew was a big opportunity to get the word out.
TED releases the talks after the conference at a rate of one per day. My best guess is that mine will probably go out sometime in May.
Can a TED talk change the world? Obviously that’s a tall order. But I’m eager to find out and grateful to have had a chance. I felt an energy that I’ve only felt on the best of days. I can’t wait for you to see it. Thank you for getting me here. Let’s keep going.
To see what Forward is doing around the country, click here. I’ll be speaking at the Hudson Valley Ideas Fest with Stephen Dubner, Coleman Hughes, Rikki Schlott, Xochitl Gonzalez, Neil Parikh and more on April 27th in Rosendale, New York. A TED talk might break out.
