Ali Ali Oxenfree

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home, and even when I was a small boy, he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And we would read, say, about dinosaurs. And maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something […] or the tyrannosaurus rex. And he would say something like “this thing is twenty-five feet high, and the head is six feet across” So he’d stop always, and say, “Now let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window… But not quite, because the head is a little bit too wide — it would break the window as it came by.” Everything we’d read would be translated (as best we could) into some reality… And I learned to do that — everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.

I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them” (Malcolm Gladwell on his speaking)