What’s Really Being Said
A new editorial project from World Speech Day
Whenever something important happens
someone makes a speech.
We decode it.
Why this exists
Speech shapes everything.
Most analysis misses the deeper meaning.
World Speech Day exists because speech matters. Because what we say — and how we say it — shapes culture, moves markets, starts wars, and ends them. For over a decade, World Speech Day has celebrated the power of the spoken word across more than 100 countries.
But there is a question that has always sat at the heart of that mission, and that nobody was properly answering.
Not the headline. Not the spin. Not what the commentators report. The real meaning — in the language chosen, the imagery deployed, the silences held, the things conspicuously left unsaid.
That question is what Talks Decoded was built to answer.
What Talks Decoded is
Not journalism. Not opinion.
Rhetorical intelligence.
When a president addresses Congress, when a CEO faces a crisis, when a TED speaker steps onto that red dot — the coverage that follows is almost entirely journalistic. What was said. Who applauded. What it means for the polls.
What almost nobody does is look at the speech itself. The structure. The rhetorical choices. The word that was used fourteen times and the word that was never used once. The moment the speaker’s language shifted — and what that shift reveals.
That is precisely what Talks Decoded does.
Every issue decodes a major speech or talk — political, corporate, cultural — and tells you what was really going on beneath the surface.
Read Talks Decoded — free
Published several times a week.
Sharp analysis. No noise.
Free to subscribe. Just sharp analysis of the speeches shaping our world, delivered to your inbox.
Also available on Substack
Read on Substack Now
Start DecodingRead free on Substack — no account required
A taste of what you’ll receive
From Talks Decoded, Issue 001
“There is no longer any room for hope”. That is the moment the United States was born. Not Philadelphia. Not July 1776. A room in Virginia, March 1775 — when Patrick Henry severed the colonial past in a single phrase that nobody remembers.
— Talks Decoded, Issue 001
Talks Decoded is written by Simon — founder of World Speech Day, the global celebration of the power of speech observed in over 100 countries.