How to Give a Speech According to the Head of TED

Most of you have heard of the famous TED Talks. For the uninitiated, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global set of conferences run by the private nonprofit organization Sapling Foundation, under the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading". TED's early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with its Silicon Valley origins, but it has since broadened its focus to include talks on many scientific, cultural, and academic topics. TED events are held throughout North America and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past speakers include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, Bono, Mike Rowe, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. TED's current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson. Since June 2006, the talks have been offered for free viewing online. As of March 2016, over 2,400 talks are freely available on the website. In June 2011, the talks' combined viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and by November 2012, TED talks had been watched over one billion times worldwide.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)

On May 16, I attended a talk given by Chris Anderson, the head of TED entitled TED Talks. As a member of Toastmasters International since 2003, I wanted to learn more about how to create an unforgettable talk. The typical Toastmasters speech is only five to seven minutes long, compared to an 18 minute TED talk, but surprisingly, I discovered that it's much harder to craft a seven minute talk compared to an 18 minute talk. I view a Toastmasters speech as a light snack -- something that can be easily consumed in just a few minutes whereas a TED talk is more like a robust salad or a hearty bowl of soup. 

When I attended the talk, the $28 ticket included a copy of Chris Anderson's latest book, TED Talks: The Official Guide TED Guide to Public Speaking. Anderson was only scheduled to speak for 45 minutes, but here are the key takeaways from his talk:

When Anderson first took over leadership of TED in 2001, he struggled to persuade the TED community to back his vision for TED. He was not a naturally great speaker, but when he spoke from his heart, Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, rose to his feet and started clapping at the end of his talk. And the whole room stood with him and started clapping too. The lesson I learned: Speak from your heart.

Start strong. Don't say you're grateful to be giving this talk. It's boring. Give people a reason to come along for the journey.

Be human and show vulnerability. One of the best ways to disarm an audience is to first reveal your own vulnerability. Share an anecdote. Talk conversationally to your audience. 

Give your audience a gift of an idea that could potentially change who they are. What is an idea? It is a super power because with ideas, we can create new worlds. Find a way of speaking up if you have an important idea to share. Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. An idea is anything that can change how people see the world. The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It's having something worth saying. And what matters is that you do it your way. 

Words matter. It's the words that tell a story, build an idea, explain the complex, make a reasoned case, or provide a compelling call to action. You can't just use your language. Use the audience's language. Use metaphors to explain something that is complex. To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things:

1. Show why it matters. . . What's the question you're trying to answer, the problem you're trying to solve, the experience you're trying to share?
2. Flesh out each point you're trying to make with real examples, stories, facts. 

Every talk should have a throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than 15 words. And those 15 words need to provide robust content. Your throughline should have some kind of intriguing angle. What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway? What is it that you want your audience to have an unambiguous understanding of after you're done? The key is to present just one idea -- as thoroughly and completely as you can in the limited time period. You should then build a structure so that every element in your talk is somehow linked to this idea. 

Make eye contact, right from the start. Eye contact, backed by a warm smile, is an amazing technology that can transform how a talk is received. Don't give a talk with your head buried in your notes. Look at your audience. Be warm. Be real. Be you.

Make them laugh, but not squirm. Humor hacks away the main resistance to listening to a talk. Audiences who laugh with you quickly come to like you. But be careful. Ineffective humor is worse than no humor at all. Telling a joke that you downloaded from the Internet will probably backfire. What you're looking for instead are hilarious-but-true stories that are directly relevant to your topic or an endearing humorous use or language. 

Several years ago, a man I used to work with told an off-color joke at a money manager seminar in front of our top clients. Perhaps the joke would have been funny if you were hanging out with him in a bar on a Friday or Saturday night, but the joke had absolutely nothing to do with the investment topic and it was inappropriate for an audience of mostly sixty to seventy-year-old couples. 

Park your ego. Would you want to trust your mind to someone who was completely full of himself? Ego emerges in lots of ways that may be truly invisible to a speaker who's used to being the center of attention:

• Name-dropping
• Stories that seem designed only to show off
• Boasting about your or your company's achievements
• Making the talk all about you rather than an idea others can use

Tell a story. We're born to love stories. They are instant generators of interest, empathy, emotion, and intrigue. The stories that can generate the best connection are stories about you personally or about people close to you. You can use stories to set up your ideas. But be careful. Some stories can come across as boastful or emotionally manipulative. The guideline here is just to be authentic. Is that the real you telling the story? A good test is to imagine whether you would tell this story to a group of old friends. And if so, how. Be real, and you won't go too far wrong. 

Persuade. Take something down that is out there and replace it with something else. Show the absurdity of the idea you're trying to replace. 

Unleash your voice. You have this whole other layer of communication by what your voice can do. You can really transform the meaning of what you're trying to say through your voice. Use your voice to pull people in.

Disconnected Young Men

On May 10, I attended a talk given by Dr. Philip Zimbardo,author of Man Interrupted: Why Young Men Are Struggling & What We Can Do About It. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is famous for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, and has written various introductory psychology books, textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life and The Time Cure: Overcoming PTSD with the New Psychology of Time Perspective Therapy. He is also the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project, a a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that teaches people how to take effective action in challenging situations. 

According to Zimbardo, the new threat to young males (preteens to twenties) is their choice to live in virtual reality instead of social reality. Unfortunately, this is not a phase and they don't outgrow it. So many young men have chosen social isolation because they don't know how to resist the enchantment of computer and video games. 

Video games are a multi billion dollar industry. They are popular because they focus on male values -- aggression, competition, war, destruction. Seventy percent of all video games are played by men. In video and computer games, young men get to experience being the hero and the antihero without the conditions or permanence of real life, and without risking life or limb. Therefore, it's no wonder that many young men consider the thrill-paced worlds of online porn and video games far more exciting than anything they encounter on a daily basis in their real lives. Thanks to the Internet, pornography is available 24/7. Children as young as six years old are watching pornography. 

The young men who game to excess often avoid anything that undercuts their means of achieving validation because it is so woven into their identities. Therefore it is doubly threatening when their activities are being questioned because they themselves are being critiqued at the same time. Virtual actions and ego become interchangeable. Distraction and immersion into their preferred virtual space serves as a shield around them, pushing any ego-puncturing inconsistencies out of sight. 

Zimbardo explained that there's nothing wrong with video games if played in moderation (one to two hours a day). For example, video games can improve hand eye coordination. The problem is that kids are playing video games seven to ten hours a day and they are addictive because they're designed to be addictive. Video game producers are constantly making their games more unusual and exciting to combat habituation. The problem is virtual reality has become more rewarding than physical reality for many young men. Multiple problems are associated with excessive gaming including obesity, desensitization to violence, social anxiety, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity, depression, and decreased school performance.  Compared with teenagers who don't play video games, adolescent gamers spend about 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework. When we immerse ourselves in a stimulating visual environment where a lot of information is demanding our immediate attention, the cognitive load overburdens our working memory. Having a high cognitive load amplifies distracted mess, and makes it more difficult for the mind to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data. Studies of gamers that play for long periods of time have shown a reduction of gray matter areas of their brains, including parts of the frontal lobe, striatum, and insult -- areas that carry out executive functions like planning, prioritizing, organizing, empathy, and impulse control.  Surprisingly, it takes only a week of playing violent video games to depress activity in portions of the brain responsible for emotional control. Zimbardo provided the following statistics:

• 47% of men who are heavy media users get fair to poor grades
• 33% of men who are moderate media users get fair to poor grades
• 23% of men who are light media users get fair to poor grades

Not all aspects of real life are laid out in a discernible pattern as is found in computer and video games. As gamification becomes more integrated into everyday life, creatures of habit will look for similar patterns elsewhere, likely becoming lost or losing motivation when the path does not appear before them. According to Zimbardo, our current generation is conceivably the less prepared generation for real world navigation, decision making, and problem solving. 

Let's face it. Earning rewards and achieving status in a virtual world is much easier than achieving those things in real life so our young men are paying the price of social isolation in the real world because their artificial worlds are so much more enticing and rewarding. One reason why young men may feel entitled to things these days is because very few of them actually participate in the process of building or maintaining the things they take for granted. Just as it is necessary to humanize a person to have empathy, in order to fully appreciate any given thing there needs to be a sense of the efforts and resources that went into making it. Nowadays, many young men have no sense of awe. They have become disconnected from the physical reality around them. Young men no longer have the patience or desire to lean how to build the foundations of success, nor are they inclined to expose themselves to what they perceive as ridicule if they were to fail along the way.  

Why are video and computer games so enticing? Zimbardo explained that when you play these games, you receive a score and the more you practice, the better you get, which motivates you to play even more in order to earn a higher score. Video and computer games offer virtual rewards at regular intervals, often after a certain level has been reached or a specific skills has been mastered. This schedule of reinforcement fits in perfectly with the kind of operant conditioning used by psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1940s to motivate pigeons to press a lever endlessly for extra food in his specially designed "Skinner Box." Behavior that is positively reinforced tends to be repeated, especially if it comes at variable rates, and in video games, after the required amount of effort and skill has been made, the reward is guaranteed. 

Some games are designed to give rewards sporadically along the way to the goal. Similar to the bait-and-switch technique, these games reward behavior only some of the time in order to keep a person engaged. Throwing in the occasional punishment -- like taking away hard-to-come-by weapons -- is another way to effectively control a player's behavior as well as motivate them to improve their skills so they don't make the same mistakes again.

The late Maressa Orzack, who was a clinical psychologist and assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, determined that the process of character development and reward systems within video games are a facet of operant conditioning, and are deliberately being incorporated into the games by their sophisticated designers. 

Why are so many young men playing video and computer games excessively? According to Zimbardo, socially isolated young men have fewer outlets for expression. Games are fun, visually dynamic and they provide young men with opportunities to form virtual communities. The goals of the game are clear and simple, and there are guaranteed rewards -- unlike real life.  

According to Zimbardo, shyness has become a self-imposed psychological prison. When I was a young child, I wanted nothing more than to shed the shackles of my self-imposed shyness. What is different today is that shyness among young men is less about a fear of rejection and more about fundamental social awkwardness -- not knowing what to do, when, where or how when faced with a social situation. They have never learned the basic rules of social communication. 

Many young men today are choosing social isolation. They don't care about what other people think of them and they are not afraid of rejection. They don't want to be part of the social community. Instead, they would rather be left alone so they can do their own thing.  The disadvantage of playing video games, especially a lot of exciting video games, is that it can make other people and real life seem boring and not worthwhile in comparison. Compared with gamers that play with others in the room, lone gamers are less likely to seek information about politics or current events, raise money for charity, or be committed to civic participation. A gamer's enemy today is social obligation: responsibilities, time management, dealing with real people, and taking real risks. 

When my son entered middle school, we noticed how he gradually drifted into the artificial world of video and computer games. He used to look forward to our Sunday family dinners at CPK (California Pizza Kitchen), but once he became hooked on computer and video games, gaming became far more important to him than family meals. Instead of eating in our dining room, he started eating all of his meals in front of a video or computer game. In vain, I tried to get rid of all of his computer and video games, but his father thought I was being too draconian and allowed him to continue playing his beloved games for as long as he wanted. 

Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, predicts that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the time he reaches age 21. To put this figure into context, it takes the average university student half that time -- 4,800 hours -- to earn a bachelor's degree. The average young man spends 13 hours per week playing computer and video games versus five hours per week for the average young woman. Young women primarily play games on smartphones and tablets; games that are short such as Words With Friends and nonviolent, whereas guys are playing immersive first-person shooter games on consoles or computers that require a keyboard and mouse and have a much longer time commitment.

Some journalists are trying to convince people that women are just as into gaming as guys, but it's misleading. The 10,000 hours figure is the average of young men and young women, and since guys play almost triple the amount, the hours spent gaming by age 21 is probably more like 14,400 hours for young men versus 5,600 hours for young women. Girls' interest in gaming generally tapers off by their teenage years whereas boys' interest increases.

Addiction to video and computer games has resulted in an unstable hierarchy of needs. If you recall from your introductory psychology class, in Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, there are five stages of growth in humans corresponding with different levels of needs. The bottom of the pyramid consists of our most fundamental needs which he called Physiological needs: food, water, sleep, shelter. The next level represents our Safety needs: employment or access to resources, health, freedom from fear. The third level contains Love/belonging needs: friendship, family, intimacy. The fourth level represents our Esteem needs: confidence, achievement, mutual respect with others. And the highest level is Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, being able to accept negative facts about yourself, achieving one's full potential. 

The Internet and virtual reality has made everything in Maslow's hierarchy of needs irrelevant except the bottom two tiers. A person who is gaming all by himself may be able to achieve their esteem needs yet completely bypass a sense of belongingness and fail to address their need for love. Gamers may think they have "hacked Maslow," but it does not come without a major side effect: entitlement without the ability to relate to others. Games put you in a fictional mature situation, but without any of the consequences you would normally face in real life. You can feel powerful and 'experienced' without all of the failures leading up to real-life success in those areas. Furthermore, self-actualization cannot be reached without the fulfillment of other needs, so a lack of intimacy and appreciation for others creates a distorted sense of potential and actualization that is not based in any shared social reality. The lack of relatable skills, especially social skills, can distort the ability to evaluate social competence and success.

Zimbardo also spent a fair amount of time during his talk discussing pornographic sites on the Internet, but I have decided to focus this discussion on violent non-sexual computer and video games. 

He concluded his talk by proposing solutions that the government, schools, parents, men and women can adopt to combat rampant computer and video game addiction among our young men. 

Government

• Create male mentorship programs
• Support the role of the father (reform welfare system, enforce paternity leave)
• Get more men in grade school teaching positions
• Get junk food out of schools
• Limit endocrine interrupters

Schools

• Teach life skills: personal finance, how to apply for a job, job interview skills and other adult responsibilities
• Teach sex education: biology and psychology of sex (most schools primarily focus on the biology of sex and ignore the psychological aspects)
• Incorporate new technology by making learning more visual and interactive
• Make education more entertaining
• The Department of Education should offer technology classes for teachers
• Quash grade inflation

Parents

• Teach responsibility and resiliency (growth mindset versus fixed mindset)
• Keep a weekly activity journal of all family members and include household chores, homework, playing computer and video games
• Take technology out of your son's bedroom
• Have regular family dinners with no cell phones or tablets allowed
• Encourage your son to join Boy Scouts

Men

• Turn off the computer and video games
• Learn how to dance and make female friends
• Set long-term goals in the real world
• Become future-oriented instead of present-hedonistic
• Vote!
• Exercise regularly outdoors in nature

Women (mothers and sisters)

• Offer compassion, constructive criticism
• Show boys how to communicate their feelings and values in a healthy way
• Date a man as if you're investing in the stock market (look at his long-term potential)

Now that my son is in college, I'm hoping he doesn't have enough time to spend hours each day playing computer and video games. Since he no longer lives with me, I have no idea how he spends his free time. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope for the best now that I have an empty nest!