They were just things I needed to figure out - questions I couldn’t stop picking at, territories that felt unmapped.

Without notes, I can have an actual conversation with the room - even though I’m the only one talking. The trade-off is fear. I’ll take the fear.

And when you’re present, actually in the room with people: it changes how you relate to them. You can’t maintain the expert-on-high posture when you’re that exposed. You’re not delivering wisdom from

I position myself as a fellow traveller. Someone who’s been looking into this stuff and found some interesting threads. “I don’t know” is part of my vocabulary on stage. So is “I might be wrong about this” and “this is the bit that keeps me up at night.”

Now comes the bit that never ends: the craft.

How do you actually build a talk that lands? Not one that’s fine. Not one that gets polite applause and a “that was interesting” on the way out. One that moves people. One that changes how they see something. One they’re still thinking about three days later.

This is the part I’m most obsessed with. The

You have to put the work in to get the work out. There’s no shortcut around that part.