Apr 16

Apr 16 When TEDx Said No

RiseLive is Coming to Ojai

For the last six years, I have been running a book coaching and inspired book publishing company, Rise Literary, with sales and distribution from Simon & Schuster, and founded in our sweet, magical, complicated town of Ojai. A few years in, we decided we wanted to take our storytelling from the page to the stage and signed up to produce TEDxOjai.

Twelve incredible speakers, one day at the then recently opened Ojai Playhouse. And what a day it was. From local speakers like Gregg Stewart, Lauren Duke, and Jennifer Pastiloff to other writers, thinkers, and poets from across the country, TEDxOjai didn’t feel like the usual keynote.

As you do when you’re producing a TEDx event, we edited the talks from that incredible day and sent them off to the TED organization. Within two days, we received their response. Ten of the talks were immediately posted, a little too quickly, if you ask us, and two were flagged. The flagged talks were given by female speakers with advanced degrees speaking on their subjects of expertise. One was an MD in psychiatry from Harvard speaking on evolutionary psychiatry. The other was an EdD in maternal studies discussing maternity choices in modern medicine. Both were well-resourced with pages of peer-reviewed studies to back them up.

Neither of them was outside the TEDx community guidelines. And TEDx gave us no feedback other than to suppress one of the talks and give the other such an egregious disclaimer that the speaker preferred we just take it down. We never knew what made the talks so incendiary and were left to our own conclusions.

Was it misogyny? Or was it corporatism? Or was it just really bad communications?

It didn’t matter. We realized we couldn’t build a stage in someone else’s name (TED of all “people”), invite and curate and coach wonderful speakers, and then have them be denigrated by what became a faceless editor whose response was identical to that of ChatGPT when we ran the talks through AI with the prompt: How might TEDx respond to this talk?

We often say, we’re moms, so if you make us mad enough, we’re just going to do it ourselves.

And on April 26, 2026, that is exactly what we are doing. Welcome to RiseLive.

RiseLive is a new stage, built on matriarchal practices of radically inspired storytelling and somatically embodied stage presence. Sure, it’s ten speakers giving ten-minute talks, but it’s also an experience. Because once we had a chance to question the TEDx model, we began to realize it was similar to why we have questioned traditional publishing. Both are built on the idea that if you can sell someone a quick fix, a 10-step solution, an easy prescription, they might think the problem is them – and not the systemic trauma which continually oppress us all.

RiseLive isn’t here to offer another Call to Action. It is here to question why we struggle with becoming our most realized selves. What are the systems that stop us? The histories that block us? The real demands for healing which aren’t about personal responsibility but about collective change.

And it all begins in Ojai, CA. Because on Sunday, April 26th, RiseLive Ojai is happening, well, live, from 10 am-2 pm. We will have those ten speakers, including Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning writer Krista Vernoff (Grey’s Anatomy, Charmed, and the creator of Rebel), conservationist, director, and Ojai local Eric Goode (Chimp Crazy, Tiger King), NYT bestselling author and Ojai local Katie Hendricks, HGTV host and famed designer Carmine Sabatella, former Mayor of Ojai Betsy Stix, local artist and our own Chief Creative Officer Vyana Novus, and Children of God whistle blower and Executive Director of the Humane Society of Ventura County, Daniel Roselle.