Here’s my latest video: a short talk about terrorism:

A short talk I wrote and performed for Ignite at 93ft East on Brick Lane, ‘London’s 66,000 guns’ which you can see below, was their second most-shared video ever (losing the top spot to Tom Scott’s excellent ‘Mob‘). Since then I’ve been the keynote speaker at Oxford Geek Night (title: How and Why your TV lies).

A bit of background on Ignite: since I recovered from quite a nasty illness I have been on a bit of a general trend to reclaim bits of life which were previously off limits to me. I’ve done big road trips, sampled some new unusual sports and tried to widen my social circle as much as possible. It was in this vein that, after spotting a tweet while in a silly mood, I applied to do Ignite London. This is an event held every six months or so which involves random people getting up on stage and performing a talk for five minutes about pretty much anything. The ‘call for papers’ goes out a couple of months in advance and the organisers select the topics they think are most interesting. The real stroke of genius in the setup, pioneered in Seattle in 2006 but since evangelised to all the world’s major cities, is that your talk must be accompanied by 20 slides which advance on a timer until your five minutes is up. No going over time, no worries about losing your place, no shifting of feet in the audience.

Anyway, I searched around for a topic, wrote some notes, prepped a few slides and hopped up on stage at 93ft East on November the 8th and delivered this bit of talking. I was pretty nervous, having never attempted anything like this before, but I think it went ok. Watch and see!