Words are the thing that I love the very most in life. Not because of how they look or sound, but because they convey meaning. They do the seemingly impossible, taking a thought out of my mind and, if I use the right words in the right way, putting it in someone else's mind. Or, I can take words from someone else to add their thoughts to my mind. I can discover things that I never knew, simply because someone recorded a series of words. I can experience things that ARE impossible, like being on a spaceship or being a mouse, if I view the right series of printed words. Public speaking is the very most fun use of words, because it can cause a group of people to collectively experience the feeling that I want them to experience. We're all having an experience together, an experience that I orchestrated, and everyone feels good after we've had it! Maybe they're going to go home and start a blog. Maybe they're going to go out and knock on a door for a candidate. Maybe they just realized what they were contributing to a problem in their relationship. Maybe it later helps them get a job. Or maybe they forget it entirely, but, for a few minutes, they let a selection of words, spoken in particular tones, accompanied by body language and perhaps visual aids, trigger them to have a collective experience with a room of other human beings having the same experience. That's exciting to me. To me, that's being able to do magic in real life. That's hypnosis and telepathy rolled into one. If I'd been born a man 100 years ago, I'd probably have gone into ministry. I've always loved the concept of collective emotional and intellectual enlightenment, and the thought that perhaps we really are all conscious together, rather than separately. I wasn't raised in any particular religion, so an obsession with the specialness of being a conscious organism is the center of my individual spirituality. Yes, I like receiving attention, but if that was all it was, I'd go into porn, not public speaking.