Do you want to just share that first so we can have that as a starting point?

Sure.

I mean, to start with the journey a little bit.

So I began my career, as you said, in the advertising industry and very quickly began asking deeper and deeper questions about what we're doing in the world when we tell ourselves we're consumers constantly.

My first boss described my job to me by saying, what you've got to remember is the average consumer sees something like 3000 commercial messages a day.

and you've got to cut through that and make yours the best.

And for a while, I was happy sort of making mine the best.

really complicated

Wasn't also World War I, the debacle of World War I, just kind of disillusioned everyone about being a subject?

I mean, I would argue that the causal chain is the other way around.

My argument is that when the subject story started to break down, when the logic that said that there are a God-given few who know best started to fray, The institutions that were developed out of that logic, the hierarchies and feudalisms, no longer could hold because people didn't believe in the story that justified them anymore.

There's a wonderful book by a man called Christopher Walker called Sleepwalkers.

that describes the onset of World War One actually as being a kind of declining confidence among the aristocracy, who then sort of postured at one another like stags and made war inevitable.

And fascinatingly, actually, arguably the subject story was kind of put back together after the First World War.

Lawrence of Arabia in his autobiography wrote that in World War I youth had won but had not learned to keep and the old men came out and remade the world in the shape of the former one they knew and so it was only actually after the Second World War and and some of the deep intellectual work that was done during that time, that a different story was born.

And so that's why the book is important because it's examples and it gives people an idea of what is possible and what people can do and what they are doing, what they are doing.

He's spent a decade traveling the world in search of democracy's next chapter, and he keeps finding it in the same unlikely place: among ordinary people faced with crisis, choosing to organize and build something together.

It's not politicians who are leading us there, it's the people.

It's citizens coming together and building the future, creating the space for the politics to move into.

Terms and more at applecard.com. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first, shall we? Yes, I'm British.

[laughs] And yes, I'm here talking to Americans about democracy on the eve of the 250th anniversary- [laughs] ... of the Declaration of Independence from Britain.

[laughs] We get it.

[laughs] I'm very tempted to chuck my talk out of the window and break into King George from Hamilton.