How I Got and Lost a TEDx Talk

Cameron Lee Cowan
12 min readMay 18, 2024

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I have already written about this topic once before when I decided to write about my experience with Thought-Leader and why I felt their program, while helpful, wasn’t quite worth the cost. After that article, several people reached out to me to express their gratitude because they were thinking of signing up for the program (which has increased in price to over 10,000 dollars), and they were glad that an insider was able to tell them what it was really like to be involved.

This article is much less about the Thought-Leader program and much ore about the TED organization itself. I won’t bury the lede on this: I was pulled off of my TEDx talk that I had landed in April. If you want to find out why that happened you can keep reading.

What Am I Doing?

I will say upfront that I did the research in February that I should have done way back in 2022 when I started this TEDx journey. I made the mistake of jumping into something I didn’t entirely understand at the outset. One of the mistakes I made was not doing my homework on TED as an organization, or what the process for getting and giving a TEDx talk really was in reality. The simple fact is that I should have found someone in my network who had given one and found out what the process was really like.

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Cameron Lee Cowan

Creative Director of The Cameron Journal. Culture, political commentary, and much more!