TEDx Talk

I recently had the honor of sharing the TEDx Ashland stage with my friend Trever Yarrish. We were asked to present our idea on creating a personal education plan and how to not only future proof yourself but also your community in doing so.

Job Loss will come more and more normal as technology replaces all of our jobs. What are we going to do about it?

Here are a few snippets from the talk that show my speaking style and audience reaction. I have to admit that the TEDx Talk is not normal for me to do. I don’t normally memorize what I’m going to say on stage.

I’m also quoting the section of the video I’m linking you to, so you can get a feel for what I’m saying and how I’m saying it.


“Today we encourage children to go and get a degree when they graduate they stand at this cliff at this edge and they’re presented with this concept of choosing a path from 10,000 paths. “

“My kids had a hard time choosing what to eat in a restaurant from a 2-page menu, imagine what occurs when you’re standing there and you’re told congratulations you’ve graduated now you need to make a choice. It leads to a lot of anxiety and some paralysis for many and it may be part of the reason why we’re seeing such a huge number of our graduates return home
after they graduate.”

“We live in a time of exponential change. Our children know this. It used to take a thousand people to build a billion-dollar company. Instagram sold to
Facebook for 1 billion dollars and it had a total of 13 employees.”

“If I stood here 20 years ago and I told you that we would be sleeping on strangers couches instead of a hotel and paying for it, you would think I was crazy yet we do that every day with Airbnb.”

“If I told you we would put our children in strangers cars and ask them to drive them home safely you would think I was crazy yet we do that every day with Uber.”

“If I told you that a man was going to disrupt the auto industry by building a luxury electric car and oh by the way that car is fully autonomous as soon as society is ready for it, you would think we were both crazy yet that’s exactly what Elon Musk is doing with Tesla and if you told me that today the largest software platform would live in this thing called the ‘cloud’ and there would be 1.5 billion people using it every single day and oh by the way it updates two times a day to all 1.5 billion people seamlessly without anybody knowing, I would say you were crazy and yet that happens every
single day on Facebook. “

“We know during all of this times of change and a lot of it’s exciting but it does create some challenges and the main challenge that Trevor and I are kind of focused on today with you is we’re talking about job loss what happens when Tesla’s Robo taxi becomes a reality no more taxi drivers, no more Uber drivers. What happens when autonomous trucking becomes reality? No more truck drivers. I’m talking about, in the United States alone, 5 million jobs. 600,000 of those in California. I’m talking about 3 percent of the US workforce. This keeps Trevor and I up at night. we’re part of the industry that’s creating amazing solutions yet there’s a price to pay and we have got to find a solution. “

“It isn’t you can’t just say well we just won’t create those solutions that’ll fix it. We can’t bury our head in the sand we need a better way.”

Here is the full video. I strongly encourage you to watch it in it’s entirety and send me feedback on what you think about our idea. Please also feel free to share this video with your friends and family on social.

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