Ted Audio Collective

It terrified me. Absolutely terrified me. And it still terrifies me.

Muhammad El-Aryan is an economist. And he gets a lot of requests to speak in public.

No matter how often I do it, the night before I will not sleep.

What is it that you're afraid of?

I'm worried about not being able to put a coherent sentence in place.

I'm still worried about it right now as I'm talking to you.

Last year, he was asked to give a speech about the global economy at a dinner in New York.

When he showed up, Muhammad found out that the host didn't elected to mention a few things about the audience.

The first one is they are precious metal traders.

You know, people who trade in one of the most volatile, risky financial products out there.

Which means their attention span is a few minutes at most.

And second, he said they've been drinking for the last hour. So they're a bit rowdy.

I said, okay. Is there something else? He said, yeah, just one more thing.

Last year, the person who did it lost control of the crowd.

And the precious metal traders, some of them got up with the bread rolls and threw them on stage.

They threw rolls at the presenter? They did.

Oh! Were they at least soft rolls?

They were soft rolls.

If someone tells you your audience is drunk and might pelt you with food, you should probably call a cab.

But Muhammad, who's generally even when things are going well, who overprepairs for everything, did something different.

I went on stage and said, I'm super anxious right now.

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