Name: It's only a story: Daniel Sloss at TEDxEaling
Uploaded: 2018-12-09T10:02:05.000Z
Duration: 14 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Thành H. Châu Reviewer: Ellen Maloney

We're all storytellers at different points in our lives.

We've all told stories in different ways in different scenarios.

Whether you've been a parent telling a child a bed time story

in a desperate bid to make them go to sleep,

whether you've been a friend telling a friend

about another friend's drunken antic at the weekend

to make yourself seem slightly less embarrassed.

Or whether you've been at a party telling a story

to try and impress the red-head in the corner

and you regale a tale about this time you were very witty and snappy,

and this verbal encounter you had with another person.

But you weren't really that funny or snappy in reality,

you only thought of comebacks on the way home,

She's on her third martini, she's ready to go.

We all tell stories in different ways as well.

When my dad tells stories he's straight to the point.

This happened, this happened then this happened,

Don't drink tequila with your mother otherwise you happen.

When my mum tells a story, she likes to have all the extra details,

all the back stories, all the character biographies

and by the end, it's been like a nine-hour version of Inception.

you just know apparently someone your mum works with is a bit of a cow.

they tell stories the way old people tell stories.

It's always stuff like: "Oh, and then I got my medal

for saving all those orphans, but enough about me, how's school?

When my brothers tell stories, they do the thing all children do

which is they have so much enthusiasm and excitement

that they promise a story that's never going to live up to your expectations.

"And then what happened?" "And then we went outside."

"And then what happened?" "Then Matthew was here."

has always ended with an unpleasant bodily function.

Everyone is a storyteller, even in the media:

television, newspapers, tabloids, podcasts, music, artists.

Everything's a different way of telling a story.

I tell stories that are punchy, jokey, all the way through in order to keep

an audiences ever-shortening attention span solely focus on me.

I tell true stories, I tell exaggerated stories,

I tell stories that are completely and utterly made up. Total lies.

Like, I'll have been sitting with my friends, having a drink,

"Ah, wouldn't it be funny if this happened?"

And then I shamelessly take it down in my iPhone.

Take it home. Write out. And somehow integrate myself into this story

in a desperate bid to get them to like me.

All we do is go out to a room full of people we've never met

So if at any point you're wondering why I agreed to do this talk,

that if I turn down the opportunity to do a TEDTalk,

I'm 22 years old, I don't know how she'd go about that,

but it's best not to argue with her when she's been drinking.

That was a perfect example. I made that entirely up,

I was willing to fabricate a story about my mother

being an alcoholic with an emotional problem

who was willing to disown me as a human being

That's what I mean by "desperate storyteller".

And the thing is we're the only storytellers, though,

that really get in trouble for our stories.

Every few weeks there is something in the newspaper

about this comedian that said something awful or offensive

that's offended one member of the audience

who, by the way, nine times out of ten, is an idiot.

And then they talk about it on the news and everything.

They get scientists and doctors to come on and analyse the joke,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

It's only a story: Daniel Sloss at TEDxEaling

stuff

context

slightly

desperate