TED Talk Reflection

The TED Talk I watched was entitled Smoking.  This talk was given in Toledo, Ohio, in September 2014 by Jonathan Ross, MD.  In his TED Talk, Jonathan speaks about the dangers of smoking and what it is costing the American public, both smokers and non-smokers.  He then proposes solutions to end smoking, thus making America better and safer.  This topic relates very closely to my service learning organization, Kentucky Center for Smoke-Free Policy, in that both Jonathan and KCSP are working to build smoke-free communities across America.

A very compelling visual aid used in Jonathan's talk

In the beginning of his talk, the audience knew the basic facts that most everyone knows about smoking: it causes death, cancer, and other health related problems.  However, I do not believe many, if any, of the audience members knew much about the actual cost of smoking and how to prevent and decrease smoking in America.  The audience was expecting to hear about the dangerous health effects that smoking causes and why they are terrible.  They may have also assumed that Jonathan would propose solutions to these problems, just not the solutions he actually proposed.  For myself, I can say that I expected Jonathan to use smoking to unveil a new medical breakthrough, seeing as he is a doctor.  I certainly did not expect his talk to be focused around marketing strategies and the economical impact smoking has in our society.

Throughout his talk, Jonathan did a great job with presenting his topic.  He did not use note cards and his visual aids were interesting and effective, while not distracting from the meat of the presentation.  His visual aids included statistics and bullet points, multimedia depictions, and his key ideas for solving the smoking dilemma.  He also included personal stories of how smoking has affected his life through the people he cares about.  His use of pathos draws the audience in and makes them draw connections to their own lives and situations.  Another aspect Jonathan did well with was the idea of relating the dangers of smoking to people’s own values.  Instead of always relating the detrimental effects of smoking to health, you may relate them to appearance or money.  In fact, he pointed out that America is losing a great deal of money on smokers due to increased cost of healthcare, work absences, illnesses, etc.  In the beginning of his, Jonathan proposes two main solutions to ending smoking: make expert counseling and medications free and prevent the start of smoking.  Throughout the middle he proposes ways to achieve these by present statistical facts.  By the end of his presentation, he reiterates his proposed solutions and shows how these can build a better tomorrow.

Even non-smoking Americans are paying for smokers

 Although Jonathan gave a very compelling talk, there was still area for improvement.  Throughout his talk, he seemed to maintain the same level of emotion.  While this is good in some cases, I felt that his speech needed more passion and more excitement.  Additionally, Jonathon only makes a few brief personal references to his wife’s parents and the fatal result smoking had on their lives.  While this may induce empathy and gives that audience real examples of the harmful effects of smoking, it would have helped his speech to have given more in-depth stories that related to the topic.  Nevertheless, Jonathan’s speech proved to be very interesting and offered some new ideas and visions for our world today.