Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250,000 to Give a Speech?

As Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. This means, to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” 

.. Lucrative speaking appearances, however, are not a modern invention. They’re 150 years old.

.. The practice arose in pre-Civil War New England in response to Bostonians’ clamor to hear lectures by abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher. A literary man named James Redpath began acting as matchmaker between anti-slavery orators and interested audiences; soon he was a de facto agent, organizing speaking tours for famous Americans. 

The result was America’s “Lyceum Movement.” The speakers broadened their scope to address the arts, politics, and science, and the Lyceum Movement became known as “the people’s college.” Mark Twain read his literary work; Abraham Lincoln warned of the corrupting influences of slavery; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lectured on the importance of women’s suffrage. 

.. The lecture circuit became the primary way intellectuals supported themselves. Susan B. Anthony gave up to 100 speeches a year to fund her activism, and Mark Twain organized lecture tours with entrepreneurial zeal.

.. A $40,000 speech is a lot less puzzling when you think of it like a concert. If an event organizer sells out a 6,000-seat auditorium, a $10 ticket should more than cover the costs. 

.. “Everyone wants to say, ‘I had lunch with Michael Lewis yesterday,’” Don Epstein, who represented the best-selling author, told Bloomberg in 2014. “It might be you and 500 other people, but it still happened.”

“For some organizations, the speech is almost secondary,” says Jim Keppler, the president and founder of Keppler Speakers. “They are looking to bring in a VIP to schmooze at receptions, pose for pictures, and sign autographs.”

.. if just one client “decides to invest $10 million… the firm will snag a 2 percent management fee—which works out to $200,000” per year.

.. As a professional association, ISRI not only wants to sell tickets to its annual conference. It wants good attendance from recycling professionals so they benefit from the networking opportunities. And people like Stanley McChrystal and Bill Clinton help them do that.

.. The current trend, Keppler says, is speakers who can talk about how to create a better company culture, improve an organization’s leadership, or stand out in a crowded market. 

.. Instead, certain organizations likely view paying a politician’s speaking fee the same way they view contributing money to his or her campaign: part of a larger lobbying effort. 

Teaching Calvin in California

To persuade them, in short, that theology matters to a liberal education.

.. But nothing outrages them — not the writings of Augustine or Erasmus or Luther — more than two or three pages of John Calvin.

.. Calvin was the most influential religious reformer of the 16th century. His theological imagination and organizational genius prepared the way for almost all forms of American Protestantism, from the Presbyterians to the Methodists to the Baptists. He was also a severe and uncompromising thinker. The Ayatollah of Geneva, some have called him.

.. “Some are born destined for certain death from the womb, who glorify God’s name by their own destruction.” This is the heart of Calvin’s teaching of predestination, his insistence that God determined each human destiny before the creation of the world. The elect are bound for heaven, the reprobate to hell, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it, ever.

.. Your merits, your good will, your moral action: None of these make a difference. The chosen Jacob is no better than the rejected Esau. The damned glorify God’s name. And God is pleased by the whole business.

.. The first lesson that Calvin teaches us is about the power of an idea, uncompromisingly expressed and shrewdly argued.

.. Be careful what you believe in. Consider the consequences of your commitments. Investigate what your own views demand.

.. The third lesson is this: that we don’t need to take Calvin’s bait.

.. “All those who do not know that they are God’s own will be miserable through constant fear.”

.. The German sociologist Max Weber’s view — that it was precisely the uncertainty generated by Calvin’s doctrine of election that helped spur the rise of capitalism — is one canonical analysis that I can now share with them. The historian Perry Miller’s view — that the inability to hew to election was crucial to the formation of colonial American Protestantism — is another.

How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever

Typographer Tobias Frere-Jones says that to devote your life to type, more than anything else you need to be very, very patient. For him, this career was the rare intersection of two others he couldn’t choose between: writing and painting, equal parts logical and emotional. He says that everyone is affected by type, even if they’re not consciously aware of it.

.. “It’s a lot like what costume designers do in films, dressing the characters in ways that quietly tell us about their personality.”

.. While Cobden-Sanderson had expunged every mention of Walker from his journals, he never hid the whereabouts of the type. There were enough details to work out where he was standing on the bridge at night: a 5-metre radius where he’d be concealed from police, oncoming traffic, and Emery Walker’s window.

“I went down on to the riverbed and within 20 minutes I’d found three pieces of type,” says Green. “It was near where I thought it was, but over a hundred years it had been pushed maybe 20 yards.”

.. In total, they found 151 pieces.

.. He’s added a further 290 characters to Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s 100, because you can’t sell a font in 2016 without the @ symbol.