Name: I Finally Did Something Cool
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T21:32:48.000Z
Duration: 14 min 38 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...

Adverbs of degree

So yeah, I'm not gonna lie, um, I just did something kinda dope.

Modal verbs - B1

Dare I say, I may have just ticked off one thing on my life bucket list and, uh, I wanna talk about it.

The second conditional

I mean, it's no secret if you actually clicked on this video after reading the title, but

Finally, I can unironically use that meme of "Thanks for coming to my TED Talk." So reverse the clock back to around, I believe it was this summer, I was heading a pop-up store over in Harajuku.

I made a whole vlog about it, which you can click up there to check out,

but while I was there, I had a bunch of fans coming to the store, you know, wanting to check out the staff, hang out with me,

and everybody who showed up there was super dope, super nice.

And out of the many lovely fans and viewers who came to say hi to me, uh, one of them was like, "Hey Joey, I, uh, just so happen to be a student over at the University of Tsukuba," which if you guys don't know is a big university up in the Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan.

Word around the grapevine is that you have always wanted to do a TED Talk.

Well, funny you should say that because this year the University of Tsukuba is actually hosting a TEDx Talk, which for those of you who don't know is an independently organised TED event.

Before anything else, you'll probably explain what TED even is in case you have no idea what it is.

TED is a non-profit organisation, uh, which stands for Technology Entertainment Design,

and they're pretty famous for organising events that invite speakers, uh, from all over the world to do these short 10 to 20 minute speeches about whatever the speaker wants to talk about in hopes that it will innovate or encourage or, I guess, influence, uh, the listeners to whatever the message is that they want to portray in their speech.

They've been around for quite a while, especially if you've been on YouTube during the early stages.

Uh, I believe they really popped off around like 5, 10 years ago with just some incredible speeches,

Uh, I watched a bunch of TED Talks while I was in university,

and it really helped me a lot with just navigating through this very, uh, rickety part of my life.

And I'm sure the same thing can be said for a lot of you guys watching this video as well who maybe grew up watching TED Talks on YouTube.

So naturally, having grown up and watched a shitload of TED Talks growing up, I always looked at that and went, "Hey, that looks kinda dope.

I, I, I really wanna, like, try it out." And that's saying a lot considering that when I was in school, uh, I absolutely sucked and despised the concept of public speaking in every shape and form, so, you know, this was me really trying to, like, push myself to get over that boundary.

I think that's something that is very important.

You know, you can't just leave your weaknesses as weaknesses.

Sometimes it's important to overcome those weaknesses and turn them into potential strengths.

So anyway, going back to the pop-up, he was like, "Hey, would you want to potentially be one of the speakers for this TEDx U Tsukuba event that is happening at the end of this year?" And without hesitation, I said, "Absolutely, yes please." I've always wanted to do one.

It just looks like something that was legitimate and also interesting and challenging for me, again, as someone who's always had this dreaded fear of public speaking.

I signed all the contractual obligations and whatnot, and then I got to work.

What am I gonna make my speech on?" I watched a crapload of TED Talks, again, after it was confirmed, just to get an idea of what kind of thing I should be talking about because, you know, I think the first thing that everybody in their mind thought when, "Oh, Joey doing a TED Talk is, oh, okay.

So you're going to do a 15 minute talk on anime." I can already see a bunch of comments on this video already talking about that.

But see, as much as I feel like I'm somewhat qualified to do a TED Talk on anime, uh, I felt that it was also slightly unnecessary.

I think at this point now, everybody and their mother knows what anime is and how dope it is.

And for the people who don't know it or don't think it's dope, they were never the target demographic anyway, so what's the point of even trying to get them on board?

But secondly, I've made literal thousands, thousands of videos, countless hours and countless litres of ink spilled talking about all sorts of anime and the overall otaku culture in my YouTube videos.

So I thought, "What's the point of doing essentially what I've been doing for the past decade or so, again, this time on stage?" I thought that would be kind of a waste of time and a waste of an opportunity to potentially touch upon a subject that I had previously not really touched upon.

So instead, I decided to pivot completely, not talk about anime whatsoever,

but talk about something that I feel just as passionate about and I feel just as qualified about,

and that was this whole idea of cultural identity.

For those of you who are tuning into me and this channel or just me in general, um, I am half Japanese, half Australian.

I was born in Australia, grew up in Australia,

but spent a lot of my childhood also in Japan and am now currently have been living permanently in Japan for the past decade.

So quick math, I've basically spent half my life in Australia, half my life in Japan.

So I feel like I'm standing in a little bit more of a unique position from your average person where I can talk about my struggles that I went through as a youth around my cultural identity.

They loved it, and they were like, "All right.

Let's get to work." Now, here's one misconception or, I guess, insider info I can tell you about TED Talks.

Uh, even though the majority of the speech is written by obviously the speaker, aka moi, the entire TEDx team usually also aids in the construction of the speech because obviously, you know, TED is an organisation that might have some regulations,

and I don't wanna say anything that would potentially upset or trigger the TED, you know, organisation because they gave me the opportunity to do such a thing.

So I had countless, countless Zoom calls with the team who, by the way, were freaking amazing, so professional.

It's really aggravating that these kids are, like, literally in their early 20s and have so much more of a smarter brain than I do.

I'm like, "Why are you guys not doing the speeches?

Why does it have to be this dumbass?" But they really helped me out to flesh out the ideas, really helped me out to see things in a different perspective because obviously we're talking about something quite sensitive like cultural identity, especially in Japan.

So I obviously didn't wanna do a speech that was too one-sided or too biased, which does tend to happen if you are the sole person writing up the speech.

So it was pretty imperative to have other people and other perspectives to help make sure that my entire speech was as neutral and as grounded as it possibly could be.

So after many revisions, after many meetings online, we finally came up with a speech that we were happy with.

I felt like it gave the core message of what I wanted to say,

and so after many, many months of it first being brought up to me and after many, many iterations, the day was finally there.

I know for the majority of people, it's like, "Okay, whatever, Joey.

That's cool." Um, but I am I'm nervous as hell, bro.

Like, I think this may be the most legitimate thing, like, the most professional thing I've done in my 12 and a half year career or just my life.

It's just like a 10, 15 minute speech that I do to a bunch of university students,

and I think it's the whole idea of a rehearsal that makes me no more nervous for the actual thing.

I mean, hell, we didn't even rehearse for our fucking Trash Taste Tour, so I'm not gonna keep them waiting any longer.

We're gonna head towards Tsukuba University, which actually is the first time I've ever been to Tsukuba University, so I-I'm pretty excited to check it out.

So the speech was happening on the Sunday.

I needed to go up on the Saturday to do a bit of a rehearsal to make sure that I knew exactly what was happening, where all the cameras are, because obviously it was going to be filmed and put up on the TEDx channel, which by the time you are seeing this video, my TED Talk is up on the TED channel.

I will leave it down in the description below if you haven't yet checked it out.

It was really surreal to see the TED logo right there on the stage next to where I was going to stand because, again, you have to look at it from my perspective.

Again, I grew up watching so many TED Talks, and

so many of the best speeches and inspirational stuff that I listened to were from these TED Talks.

I formed so many opinions and so many life philosophies through some of these speakers, so I needed to make sure that, at least for me, I needed my bar to be set pretty damn high to make an impact that I would be satisfied with.

I made sure to, you know, get all of the nerves out of me, and

then, yeah, it was it was essentially go time after that.

Say that I was nervous backstage, uh, would be an understatement.

Mind you, I've done US tours and Europe tours with the boys on Trash Taste,

but this was something completely different.

Unlike the Trash Taste Tour, unlike all of the videos I post online about my opinions on anime, this felt so much more personal.

Like, what I was about to talk about was going to be some real personal shit.

Like, I made sure it was personal as well because in the slideshow that I had running in the back during my speech, I had pictures that the world has never seen before of my childhood.

So yeah, that's something else to look forward to if you go and watch that speech.

Honestly, that 10, 15 minutes on stage of me doing the speech was kind of just a blur.

Uh, I just was trying to make sure so hard not to fumble on any words.

Now, mind you, I didn't remember the entire TED speech.

You might see a lot of people saying, like, "Oh, yeah.