Behold, my TED talk

How it came together in 3 weeks

My TED talk is out today, on the topic of personal agency. More specifically: What addiction and recovery taught me about agency, and why I think it’s more accurate to think of it as a learnable sensibility or toolkit than as a fixed character trait.

I wasn’t quite sure what to write to accompany the video, and I’ll be perfectly happy if you skip the cover letter and just watch it. But Sasha thought the story of the talk was itself a nice little vignette about agency, so here it is.

Doing a TED talk was not exactly a lifelong dream for me. Up until about March 13 of this year, my official position was that I never wanted to do one. I don’t find public speaking mortifying in the way some people do, but the idea of giving a rehearsed talk in front of a huge live audience was not one I relished.

March 13, however, was when Sasha and I got the first round of feedback from publishers on the book proposal we’d started shopping around, and the nearly unanimous sentiment was “cool idea, but who are you?” Unless we could find a way to get publicly linked to the topic of agency, publishers didn’t think anyone would read it. On reflection, this seemed pretty fair! What kind of authority on agency could I claim to be, if I couldn’t even build a platform for myself?

I quickly reached out to a bunch of friends for advice, and one of them pointed me in the direction of my old friend Liv Boeree, who was a guest curator for the TED conference starting on April 7. The slate had been set months in advance, but I couldn’t see the harm in asking, so I sent Liv a text to the effect of “heyyyyy any chance you have a blank spot in your lineup I can pitch you for?” Her response was, predictably, absolutely not — but the next day she messaged again, asking what I had in mind. It suddenly looked like one of her talks might fall through, and although she told me not to get my hopes up, she was considering her options for a backup.

I quickly calculated that it was in my interests to get my hopes up, and, after sharing a few thoughts with her, sat down and wrote a talk based on my original blog post on agency, just in case. I had it ready to share by the time Liv heard back from TED that they’d consider adding it to the schedule, if I could produce a draft right away.

Thus began three weeks of insane cramming. One small problem I had to address off the bat: The TED folks didn’t like my talk very much. The straightforward tone I’ve gotten accustomed to using in writing for business audiences, rationalists and tech bros of all genders made me seem, in a word (invoked multiple times), “unlikable.”

No problemo. This simply confirmed my worst suspicions about myself. Not. one. problemo.

I rewrote the talk to focus less on my high-agency successes and more on my escape from the ultimate agency-destroyer, drug addiction. Then I rewrote it a few more times in response to feedback from different audiences. (FWIW, I think the feedback and advice I got from TED was excellent from top to bottom — I ended up with a stronger talk that was much better suited for their audience than the one I started with.) I got the final sign-off on the text on April 3, just before I arrived in Vancouver for the conference.

TED advises you not to memorize your talk, but what they really mean is that you should memorize it so thoroughly that war could break out next to the auditorium and you could finish it while running for cover. It simply should not sound memorized.

This part was actually fun — rarely in adulthood does one have the luxury of an assignment where the win condition is so clearly defined. I isolated myself for three days, pacing around my room while drilling the talk in sing-song, in triple time, in Siri-speak — whatever I could do to avoid the cardinal sin of memorizing inflections along with the words. I muttered it to my menu over nine meals at the hotel restaurant. I put in AirPods to fake a phone call and recited it while strolling along the enormous underground shopping arcades near the waterfront.

After all of that practice, and 30 well-timed milligrams of propranolol, the actual talk wasn’t that scary. When I watch it, of course, all I see are the ways it could have been better if I’d had more time. But I know that kind of haunting is the cost of doing things you’re not fully prepared for — and sometimes the only chance you get is the chance to do it under-prepared.

I’m grateful to Liv and TED for the opportunity to speak, and to my family, Serenity Knolls, and recovery programs for the opportunity to live again.

I hope you like the talk!

2026 Update: I wrote a book, You Can Just Do Things, that’s a practical guide to developing personal agency from someone who learned it later in life. It’s now available for purchase.