Clarissa's Blog

The Russian journalist was nice. She said she emigrated from Russia to Ukraine in 2013 and learned the language, so I forgave her for being Russian. Unfortunately, she’s not a great public speaker and doesn’t know that unless you have a talent for public speaking, you need to train and prepare. A lot of stuff she wanted to talk about involved play on words (like the famous babovna), and you just can’t explain that well if your English isn’t fantastic and you haven’t thought it through beforehand.

But the star of the event was an American professor of International Relations who talked about what the world will look like in 2050. He’s a superb public speaker, better than I am. Brimming with energy and optimism. He explained why all the doom-and-gloom predictions about the war with China, climate apocalypse, or resource scarcity were stupid. I hear the arguments he made regularly on Ukrainian TV, and it was a strange experience to hear them in English. I was greatly tempted to ask him if he was a Ukrainian spy because both the content of his talk and the energetic, exultant delivery sounded very familiar.

Of course, the audience bristled because they love drama and imaginary catastrophes.

We need many more people like that professor. He was like a smart Tony Robbins.