On September 21, 2013, I took the stage at TEDxSFU (Simon Fraser University's TEDx event, held at the Convocation Mall Theatre in Burnaby, British Columbia, under the theme "Make It Yours") to talk about biohacking as the forefront of a new kind of human evolution. The talk walked through my journey as one of the first do-it-yourself RFID implantees: unlocking doors, turning on lights, and logging into computers with a swipe of the hand, and what anyone curious about biohacking should know before joining in.
Getting to a TEDx stage had a longer arc than my minutes on stage suggest. Two years earlier I'd been in the audience at TEDx Vancouver, invited (I suspected at the time) because of all the Canadian media coverage around my implants. The Canadian press had interviewed me so often during my Vancouver-visiting years that several stories confidently described me as a Canadian from Vancouver, which was news to this particular American. Sitting in that 2011 audience I assigned myself 30-day challenges (talk to a stranger every day, exercise twenty minutes) and took notes on what made simple ideas land from a stage. In 2013 I got to test those notes from the other side of the lights.
The video went online on October 17, and for anyone who wanted to follow along at home, I posted the slide deck for download alongside it.