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How To Skip the Small Talk and Connect With Anyone | Kalina Silverman | TEDxWestminsterCollege

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A TEDx stage became the launchpad for a simple pitch: skip “how are you” and ask something that actually matters.

Kalina Silverman stood in front of a Westminster College audience with a pitch that sounds almost too simple to work: stop asking strangers what they do for a living, and start asking what they want to do before they die. Her talk, “How To Skip the Small Talk and Connect With Anyone,” walks through how she turned a personal bout of loneliness into a street-level experiment with a video camera, a list of unusual questions, and a willingness to get turned down.

• Silverman, a Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism graduate, conceived the Big Talk concept in late 2014 after feeling isolated despite being constantly surrounded by peers.
• She leaned on her journalism training to approach total strangers on the street with a video camera, replacing “How are you?” and “What do you do?” with questions like “What do you want to do before you die?” and “What are you curious about lately?”
• The strangers she filmed opened up almost immediately, sharing personal hopes and emotional truths that eventually helped Big Talk grow into a video series and a broader conversation movement.

The Problem With Small Talk

Silverman opens her TEDxWestminsterCollege talk by naming the discomfort most people already feel but rarely say out loud: even when we do talk to each other, the conversation tends to skate along the surface. Weather, weekend plans, “what do you do” — she argues this script keeps people at arm’s length even when they’re standing right next to each other. That gap between constant contact and actual connection is exactly what pushed her to build something different, and it’s a theme that runs through work examining why disconnection breeds anxiety and depression even in crowded rooms.

Turning a Journalism Skill Into a Social Experiment

Rather than treat that discomfort as a reason to stay quiet, Silverman treated it as a reporting problem. Her Medill training had taught her how to walk up to a stranger, camera in hand, and ask a real question without flinching at the possibility of rejection. In late 2014, she took that instinct off the reporter’s beat and onto the sidewalk, approaching people with no story assignment at all — just a camera and a question she actually wanted answered.

The Questions That Break the Script

The core of Big Talk is the substitution: swap the default opener for something that requires an actual answer. Silverman’s examples from the talk include “What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever gone through?” and “If you could change one thing about how people treat each other, what would it be?” — alongside street-level prompts like “What do you want to do before you die?”

What do you want to do before you die?

What surprised her, she tells the TEDx audience, wasn’t that a few people opened up — it was how many did, and how fast. Strangers from wildly different walks of life answered with genuine hopes and unresolved grief rather than the polite deflection she expected. Silverman frames this as proof that people are hungry for the invitation to be honest; they just need someone to skip past the script and ask.

From a Street Corner to a Movement

Silverman is careful to note that Big Talk isn’t about forcing instant friendship or demanding vulnerability from people who’d rather keep things light — that’s a fair way to move through the world too. Her point is narrower: that intentional, targeted questions can turn a thirty-second sidewalk exchange into something that actually sticks with both people afterward. That same instinct toward deliberate self-awareness shows up in discussions of how people manage their own emotional reactions in everyday interactions.

What started as one Northwestern grad with a camera and a list of questions became the seed of a project that outgrew the sidewalk experiment entirely, evolving into the video series and wider Big Talk movement Silverman references by the time she takes the TEDxWestminsterCollege stage. The talk itself is really just the origin story — the camera, the strangers, and the moment she realized the questions worked better than she’d hoped.