Kalina Silverman: How To Skip the Small Talk and Connect With Anyone (Transcript)

And so that’s kind of what happened at this picture.

And also this picture, when I was out of the party that same week and so these pictures they made it to Facebook. I was smiling in them, all my friends saw them, they’re like looks like you’re having a great time in college. And that’s not really how I felt on the inside.

And this is a picture of my diary that I started writing in that same first week of college. And I actually have it right here with me, and I am going to read you my very first diary entry.

September 27, 2012. I wish I could start out my first entry with an ecstatic quote about life or how I love college so much. But since this is a personal journal, I can be honest and say I’ve never remembered feeling more lost in my entire life and only three quarters to know that everything will work out and I’ll be OK. I miss home and being surrounded by people who know me so well and love me for all that I am.

And so that whole first year of college I was plagued by this one question: Who am I? I really had felt that I had lost my identity in leaving my home in California, leaving my friends behind to start college for the first time. And it was until the end of my freshman year when things were a lot better, that I had to learn what Donald Draper did in Season 2, Episode 12 of Mad Men that the only thing that had been keeping me from being happy was the belief that I was alone and feeling that way my first week of college.

And I actually put out this query over Facebook on the last few weeks of freshman year and said, “Hi everyone. I’m doing my final journalism project on people struggling to adjust to college the first year. If anyone is willing to talk to me about it, like please let me know and message me”. And I was shocked when within just a couple hours I got messages from people all over campus. A lot of them expressing their pain, their first year of college and I thought, ‘Wow if only I was able to talk to these people that first week of school when I was also feeling lost and alone’. And actually one of those people, she was someone I had met at one of those parties in the beginning and we had kind of just met and been service level friends and that last week of school I interviewed her and we ended up sitting in the student lounge together and sharing each other’s experiences and talking about how lonely we had felt that entire year and we were both like, wow, if only we had said this to each other when we first met we wouldn’t have felt so lonely. And so she ended up becoming one of my best friends in college and so that was end of freshman year.

And then sophomore year things got so much better. I ended up joining a sorority. I got super involved with that, I was really involved with my journalism projects. I started a club or co-founded a club called MIXED which is the Mixed Race Student Coalition and the whole idea was it didn’t matter where you came from, what your background was, we all could share in our mixed experiences. And so I would be going out to all these parties, they had a lot of friends at that point. But there would still be nights where I’d come home from an evening out with my friends and I’d still feel terribly empty inside and I couldn’t understand it. I had just been with all these people. I still felt pretty lonely and you know one of those nights I was Skyping with one of my friends from far away. And we were having this very deep philosophical conversation about life and I said, “Wow, I wish all conversations could be like this. This is awesome”. And he was like, ‘Yes, screw small talk”. And I was like, yeah, screw small talk. Why do we even make small talk?

And I thought you know what if when talking to our friends, coworkers or even complete strangers, we could always just skip the small talk and instead talk about the things that really mattered in life or things that you both actually really cared about and wanted to talk about. And so I was like wait, screw small talk, skipping the small talk. We should make big talk and I thought the name was kind of cute and I didn’t really know what to do with it at the time but I kind of just like sacked in my back pocket and just thought about it for a bit. And so that was the end of my sophomore year of college.

And then the following summer I was getting very involved in my journalism program and I had the opportunity to do some documentary projects abroad and I spent three weeks in Ecuador filming a documentary about education reform. And those three weeks were the best three weeks of my life. We were traveling throughout the entire country, interviewing strangers, everyone we encountered about education in the country and it didn’t matter if we were like gliding down the Amazon River or climbing the Andes Mountains or salsa dancing through the colonial streets of Cuenca, everywhere we went we were being open to new people, new experiences and every day was a new adventure. And the picture on the top left, right, was actually taken when one day we had run into these professors at this university and they invited us into their villa overlooking the Andes Mountains, we ended up drinking wine with them all evening and salsa dancing. And I was like, wow, why didn’t this ever happen with my college professors back home.

There’s something different in the way I’m approaching life when I’m traveling, the way I’m more open to people and it invites these kind of magical experiences, and towards the end of my trip I actually started getting really scared to go back home to my everyday life. I didn’t want to lose this magic — this magic of being abroad and I thought, you know, how can I make every day life feel this meaningful and look this beautiful?

And I had one more opportunity to travel that summer. I went to Germany to do a documentary about holocaust and on one of my last days in Germany, I visited the Berlin Wall and I came upon this question written on the Berlin Wall. It said: ‘What do you want to do before you die?’ And this question really hit me because I just finished sophomore year, going through my mid-college life crisis, questioning: What’s my purpose? Why am I studying journalism? What do I really want to do with my life? And everyone else is asking you that question too constantly when you come home for summer break.

And so I thought about it, like what do I really want to do? I knew in part it was about building empathy between strangers as I’d kind of done through MIXED and through my traveling, documentary projects. And I also knew I’d always wanted to start a YouTube channel. So that summer I came home my five weeks before starting my junior year of college. And I kind of took this question: What do you want to do before you die? And I took that name that inspired me months earlier: Big Talk and I took the magic I had felt from traveling and approaching strangers and hearing their life stories and I made this video. And I’m going to play the first half of it for you for the sake of time.

[Video Clip]

[Hi, I am Kalina and this is the beginning of an experiment called Big Talk. I wanted to be able to go out, meet new people and instead of just make small talk, actually have deeper meaningful conversations with them. ]

 

That’s half the video. And in the rest of video just through these two questions, I was able to learn so much more about those strangers’ life stories. And in making that video I had kind of re-found the magic that I was scared of losing from traveling and from my experiences interviewing people and just going out of my way to talk to people.

And so I posted that video to my Facebook and I was shocked when a girl who is an alum of my university who works with the Huffington Post said I saw your video and I want to write an article about it. And I got so excited and that’s what she did. And after that it sort of went viral and it got featured on other sites like USA Today and Elite Daily and a few other different blogs. And because the video went viral, I started getting people from all across the world reaching out to me about this video I made. It didn’t matter who they were or where they came from.

I had a rabbi and a Christian, Sunday school teacher both saying, you know, I want to use this kind of Big Talk strategy with my students. I had a soldier in Israel and a soldier in South Korea both reach out to me over Facebook message and say we don’t have enough Big Talk in the Army and I wish I could make Big Talk with my fellow soldiers. Had one woman reach out to me over Facebook message and I actually started crying in the student lounge when I was reading this, and she said, ‘Kalina, I think you saved my life. Watching this video made me realize that I need to quit smoking before it’s too late’.

And I had a lot of college students too who said that the story of my loneliness in freshman year really resonated with them also, and students from the East Coast, the Midwest, the West Coast, a lot of international students too, Singapore, South Africa and I was shocked that people all over the world were saying the same things and one message could hit them all of the same. And I even had entrepreneurs in San Francisco who were really intrigued by the idea, the name Big Talk is like kind of a two worded, like start-up name maybe.

And then I had international models from Germany, Thailand saying you know in the modeling industry there’s a lot of shallowness and we need more big talk there and this all just came from a YouTube video and a lot of people expressed a similar sentiment and some people even said, I want to join your movement and make big talk and I was like wow, I never thought of this as a movement. And after that I got so inspired to turn it into a movement.

And I kind of came up with these new research questions where, how do I scale big talk beyond just my own YouTube videos. How can we enable strangers to engage in deeper conversations right away, like how do we make it not weird to just skip the small talk and jump into big talk? And then how do we take these universal life questions, like what do you want to do before you die, which you could ask any human being that question, right? And how do we use them as a tool for building empathy across boundaries of space and our external perceived differences. So I became really enthralled by these questions and I started giving talks in the workshops, make big talk workshops and I created this deck of tiny cards 90 mini Big Talk question cards. And every question had to be universal, like you could ask anybody meaningful thought provoking, skips the small talk and open ended, that it would elicit a story that you could sit down with another human and hear their life story.

And there were questions like, what do you spend too much time doing? What is the new habit you want to form? What is your biggest fear? And I became more and more, to be honest, obsessed with idea of growing Big Talk and I was like I want to — like I started reading entrepreneurship blogs, like how do you build like a big movement and enterprise around it. And I was like I am going to take this idea to Silicon Valley and that’s what I did.

I went to San Francisco and I led a Big Talk seminar at Thiel Summit and I started hosting like these dinners with strangers like Big Talk southerners and strangers and I would have people write their own Big Talk style questions too, to ask each other. And then I started spending a lot of time behind my computer, figuring out how can I grow Big Talk, I put up this website where I was putting up all the events and the cards and everything and then something weird started to happen.

In trying to grow this movement, it was all about — it originally was created out of my own loneliness in freshman year and desire to meaningfully connect with people, I suddenly found myself feeling very alone and disconnected to the world. I forgot to mention that I also decided to take a leave of absence from university last year, halfway through my junior year of college to work on Big Talk. And so a [wise] professor once told me, before you go out and try to feed the world, you need to learn how to feed yourself. So that’s what I did.

I started asking myself, how can I scale these meaningful connections using new technologies without losing my own humanity in the process? And I was asking myself these Big Talk questions, like who am I. And what’s most important in life, like why am I so passionate about Big Talk? And I started making Big Talk with myself. I took the deck of 90 mini Big Talk questions and started using them as journal entries and used Big Talk to reconnect with myself. And so now that I feel more comfortable with kind of re-understanding why I started in the first place. My original vision holds strong and I’m ready to kind of embark on it again and understand that it takes time to figure out the big stuff, we’re not going to figure it out right away.

And the ultimate vision is to use Big Talk to build a global entity through the power of connection over sharing stories, about our universal human experiences but also just as important to use Big Talk as a tool for understanding and connecting with yourself. And in light of the theme of today’s TEDx down there, I want to leave you with one more Big Talk question to ask yourself: How can I take what I learned today to make my life different tomorrow?

Thank you.

 

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