Comedian Sam Hyde Sneaks Onto Ted Talks Stage, Delivers Obsurdity

In attempting to showcase the absurdity of some Ted Talks the comedian Sam Hyde recently lied his way onto the TEDx program strage at Drexel University. If you watch Ted Talks presentations you know that they are meant to showcase what people are capable of and what we can do to help our planet prosper well into the future. While the top Ted Talks speeches are inspiring, others leave us scratching our heads and attempting to put together semi-coherent thoughts into a bigger perspective.

The entire stunt went down last weekend and involved Hyde as he delivered a 20 minute talk about the “2070 paradigm shift.”

After the first minute or two the speech is really hard to watch, so just imaging TEDx attendees who sat through 20 minutes of the strange presentation.

At one point during the speech Sam Hyde proclaims, “What inspire me, is teaching African refugees how to program Javascript. What inspires me is finding out how to use MagLev trains to get resources to the moon. These are the challenges that tomorrow’s going to face.”

Hyde is a member of the comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme, and Philadelphia Magazine explains how he got on the TedX stage:

One wonders if the organizers of TEDx whiffed on vetting Hyde, which wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes of Googling. [TEDx organizer Dhairya Pujara] was not immediately available to comment afterward, but Hyde allegedly fed them a good story. Hyde said: “I told them I had just returned from Mogadishu where I was shooting war journalism following this group of women cleaning up the neighborhood, and by picking up trash, they had lowered crime rate. So it’s like broken window theory there, or whatever the fuck. A little Malcolm Gladwell. [They] wrote back and said, ‘Wow, that’s exciting. We got some real hard hitting stuff here.'”

So there you have it, simply feed some BS to TED Talks organizers and you too can talk about how washing machines can save the world and buying everyone a Coke can put a smile on the planets collective faces.