Kalina Silverman: Founder of Big Talk

Mainstream media and American culture tell us that college should be the best four years of our lives. When I started college, I was constantly surrounded by people, yet I couldn’t help but feel very alone. I was having a lot of surface-level conversations and not developing many genuine friendships.

I ended up meeting some of my closest friends in college, but I’ll always remember that visceral sense of loneliness and isolation in the beginning. Now that I’m a few years out of college, I’ve realized that so many people felt the same way. One of those people is Kalina Silverman. The loneliness Kalina experienced her freshman year propelled her to create Big Talk, a movement to skip the small talk and make meaningful connections instead. Big Talk has been featured by the Huffington Post, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, USA Today, and Washington Post. In 2016, Kalina gave a TEDx talk about Big Talk that now has over six million views on Youtube.

Below, Kalina and I discuss how her Asian American and Jewish identities influence her approach to Big Talk, her time in Singapore working on Big Talk, and the benefits and challenges of being a creative entrepreneur. 

Photo courtesy of Kalina Silverman

Rebecca: Can you start by telling me about your upbringing, especially regarding your Asian American and mixed identities? 

Kalina: I'm half-Chinese and half-American; my mom is from Shanghai, and my dad is Jewish and from Ohio. As a kid I attended both Chinese school and Hebrew school one or two times a week. I had friends from all different backgrounds, but I also always did stereotypical Asian things like being in orchestra, taking piano lessons and doing a Chinese a summer program in China. There were times when I leaned into my Chinese identity and other times where I kind of brushed it aside, because I thought I was this kind of cool American kid.

Rebecca: Growing up, did you ever feel like the Asian American or Jewish sides of your identities were at odds?  

Kalina: I was fortunate to grow up in Santa Monica, California where a lot of people are mixed race, and I had a lot of friends who were also half-Jewish or half-Chinese or half something else. I had a good balance between my Chinese and Jewish identities growing up. I met my best childhood friend in preschool and she’s also half-Chinese, half-Jewish. Just knowing someone else who was like me helped validate my experience and I never felt like I was different or weird because of that. When I went to Northwestern for undergrad, my mixed identity felt more at odds, because it seems like it’s not as common in the Midwest. At Northwestern, I co-founded a club called Mixed to address that part within me.

Rebecca: Now that you're an adult, do you still practice Asian American or Jewish traditions? 

Kalina: That’s a really good question, because it’s recently been brought to my attention that I might lose these parts of myself if I don’t actively practice them. When you're a kid, your parents sign you up for Chinese school or Hebrew school, but it’s different now that I’m an adult. I went to my dad's for Hanukkah a few weeks ago and it's almost like okay, I checked the Jewish box by doing that. Judaism isn’t an ongoing practice or spiritual awareness within me anymore, but I do feel like it shaped a lot of who I've become up until this point. Thinking about my Chinese side, I haven't been to China in a while. I make dumplings with friends as a fun novelty thing, but it's less of a deep intrinsic part of my identity or in my immediate awareness. I think about what's going to happen when I have kids, and I just haven't thought about or can't really imagine putting my kids through Chinese school or Hebrew school. It feels almost like a thing of the past or from our generation. I wonder what will happen next for society as being mixed becomes more common and what will get lost in the process culturally. 

Rebecca: Yeah, I think about that too, since I'm also second generation. I wonder about how I’ll pass down parts of my Taiwanese culture to my children without it feeling overly contrived. I’d love to hear more about your parents. Did you ever feel like they wanted you to follow a certain path professionally or did you feel like you had a lot of flexibility? 

Kalina: My parents met in graduate school in Boston; they’re both MD PhDs and doctors currently. My mom immigrated from China to attend graduate school, and education has always been really big in my household. My sister wants to be a doctor and she just got into her first med school, but I've always been the creative one. As a kid that was really celebrated - my parents let me do theater and all sorts of things like that. But now I feel like I always have this tension within me between being professional and making a lot of money versus this weird creative entrepreneurial path I'm on. I’m trying to always validate it within myself. It doesn't feel like my entrepreneurial side is tied to my identity, but I think it actually is and that's something I'm trying to grapple with.

I’ve always had my parents’ support - they’ve always known I wanted to do something different from them. After I passed through childhood and went to college, I felt like I didn’t really have guidance or a reference point. No one in my family is an entrepreneur or a creative professionally, so that's been hard for me. A lot of times I don't know where to turn for advice. Sometimes I feel pressured and sad like when I see my sister in the room with my mom for four hours getting advice about med school. Whereas I have no idea what to do besides just trying to figure it out, Google things, talk to people or just make mistakes and carry on. And that can be very scary. My parents still support what I do wholeheartedly, but they do see a lot of my fears and frustrations and don't know if that's best for me. I don't even know if that's best for myself. I'm trying to get more comfortable with the uncertainty surrounding entrepreneurship, but it's still really hard when I have so many friends who make six figures and have nine to five jobs. But I'm also so appreciative of my life. I get to make my own path and follow my passions every day. Overall, I think it's a mixed experience.

Rebecca: I appreciate your honesty, especially since today with social media, it’s easy to feel like people don’t have insecurities and that their successes happened effortlessly. Can you tell me about how you started Big Talk? 

Kalina: Big Talk started off as a passion project. When I was a freshman at Northwestern, I felt so alone especially in the first few weeks. It didn't make sense to me, because I was surrounded by people, doing new things all the time and having so many new experiences. But I felt really disconnected and isolated. In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense now - I had moved from California for the first time, and I was in a completely different environment with different people. But I do attribute a lot of that loneliness to feeling like I couldn't just be my full self. There's a lot of small talk and superficiality that goes on at the beginning of school, since everyone is trying to show their best self. It wasn't until later in the year when I had started Mixed and joined a sorority that I finally started to make some close connections and have a lot of friends open up about their struggle to make friends. Some of them were people I had met at the beginning of freshman year who had seemed so confident and put together. I thought if only we had all opened up right at the beginning, we would’ve felt a lot less lonely and formed much stronger bonds right away. 

People go through a lot of awful mental health struggles in college. I’m someone who is fortunate to be loved and supported by my family, but I still had a really tough time mentally freshman year. The idea for Big Talk was born when I was talking about these topics with a friend. We were having a pretty deep conversation and I said wow, I wish more conversations in college could be like this. He was like yeah screw small talk, and the name Big Talk popped into my mind. 

The year after that I was at Northwestern’s journalism school, so I was learning a lot about interviewing people and making videos. I went on a couple of international experiences making documentaries like one about the Holocaust in Germany and another about education in Ecuador. In those places I was approaching people, asking them deep, hard questions right away, and making these really special connections. The documentaries were almost like my excuse to connect with people.

When I got home from those trips, I really wanted to keep having these kinds of deep conversations and meaningful experiences in my day to day life. That’s when I tried this social experiment that I called Big Talk, where I walked up to strangers in my hometown and skipped the small talk. Right away, I asked them the question “what do you want to do before you die.” I found that it didn't matter if I was asking a homeless man, businessman, a teenage boy or an elderly woman - people would have similar answers that showcased the human experience. I found something really magical and powerful about this Big Talk method of questioning people; it was a way to connect with people across all sorts of backgrounds.

I published the video to YouTube and it went viral. I was shown that my hypothesis was correct. So many people have reached out to me even to this day saying they feel the same way, they were feeling lonely and disconnected or they want to better connect with people. It doesn't matter their age or where they're from - so many people have the same sentiment and that's what's kept me going with Big Talk for over five years. There still seems to be a need for it, and there’s so much work to do within the space.

Rebecca: Have there been experiences where people are reluctant to participate in Big Talk or shy away, because they’re uncomfortable answering these deeper questions? 

Kalina: There's been a bit of that, but not as much as you would think. Over time, I've developed a good intuitive sense about when to introduce Big Talk to people, and I don't just walk up to anyone. I pay attention to people’s body language and the way they talk or interact with other people. I'm very aware and think about when it's appropriate to bring Big Talk up. There are plenty of times that I'm just hanging out with friends or at a party, and it's all small talk which is fine. But I can also sense when someone needs it in their life. You can kind of tell when someone is more open or craves something deeper. 

Rebecca: Culturally a lot of Asians or Asian Americans aren't as comfortable being vulnerable or sharing emotions. This can be exacerbated by language, cultural, or generational gaps between us and our parents. Has this affected the way you think about or work on Big Talk? 

Kalina: Yeah, absolutely. I did a Fulbright research project for a year in Singapore about how to use Big Talk to build empathy across cultures. I was very aware that there are different communication styles around the world, especially in Asian culture. It's a lot harder for people to open up to their superiors and their elders in Asian culture, and they become more withdrawn. But that doesn't mean they don't need Big Talk. Recently I talked to a girl who goes to school at NYU Shanghai. We really want to translate Big Talk into Chinese and bring it to schools to help people talk about mental health, since that's something that's still very taboo in China. Being Asian makes me more aware of that experience. I’ve seen it firsthand: my own mom and her mom weren't very open emotionally with each other, although I am with my mom. I can see the pain that comes from people being withdrawn and closed off from one another. This is definitely something I want to work on since I have this half outsider, half insider perspective. 

I think about Big Talk now across different need spaces, whether it's between a kid and their grandparent or an employee and their superior. That's something I'm still trying to work on and figure out and be really sensitive toward, because I would never want someone to feel really uncomfortable from Big Talk. I want it to be a really positive eye opening experience for everyone who participates. I don't want anyone to be put off or damage any relationship, so I'm trying to be really careful and slow moving on this front. But I've seen how it's helped me with my own relationships a lot, and that, as well as stories people send me, gives me inspiration to keep going. But I definitely still feel like there's this barrier that I'm trying to figure out how to break through.

Rebecca: Can you tell me more about your Fulbright project in Singapore and how you chose the research topic? 

Kalina: When I gave the TEDx Talk a few years ago, I received a lot of feedback from people through email. I got quite a few responses from people in Singapore, who mentioned things like struggling with mental health and not knowing how to talk about it, going to conferences and networking events where it was all small talk, or not knowing how to open up to family. Singapore is a really multiethnic country; there are a lot of Asians there of course, but also a lot of expats and migrant workers. It was like a cool microcosm to test out Big Talk in. They call it Asia for beginners, so it was a great place for me to start and live on my own. Singapore is also a really efficient country, where things are changing really fast and modernizing. I thought it was a place where I could get a lot of stuff done, and not have to deal with different barriers, even things like transportation, because it’s really easy to get around in Singapore. 

Rebecca: How did living and working in Singapore affect the way you think about your Asian American identity and working on Big Talk? 

Kalina: It made me aware that being mixed is in some way a very privileged position to be in, and I need to understand the biases that may come with that. It might be easy for me to do Big Talk with both Asians and expats, but maybe it's not as easy for an Asian to make Big Talk with an expat in Singapore. I used to just float around and be like yeah Big Talk for everyone, but it's not that easy. I still want to maintain my idealism around Big Talk being something anyone can do and it’ll help them, but I need to be more aware of social and communication barriers that exist in different cultures, societies, and races. 

Kalina giving a Big Talk presentation at the National University of Singapore; photo courtesy of Kalina Silverman

Rebecca: Earlier you mentioned that Big Talk started as a passion project. How did you make the decision to work on it full time? 

Kalina: After I saw its initial impact while I was at Northwestern, I realized that I wanted more time to work on this. I saw there was a specific need and I was getting messages everyday from people who were asking more about Big Talk. I realized there's something very special right in front of me, and I have the privilege to work on it. I even took time off from Northwestern, so I could just focus on it. I was always half doing Big Talk and half doing something else, and it was a mental struggle for me. I worked all sorts of jobs from being a receptionist to fitness modeling to interning at a marketing agency, and whenever I was working those jobs, I was also working on Big Talk on the side. 

Getting the Fulbright to Singapore was like my first confidence boost - I realized I could be given a year to just work on Big Talk and that was completely life changing for me. When I came back, I started getting paid to give Big Talk speeches, and I was selling the card game of questions. I started to realize that I can make a real income from this - it’s not like a huge income, but I can support myself and that made me want to try going all in. I still do odds and ends jobs every now and then. During the beginning of the pandemic, I was tutoring kids in the mornings. I feel like there’s so much to work on with Big Talk and since I can sustain myself with it, I want to work on it full time. 

Rebecca: What is your advice for people who want to pursue more creative entrepreneurial pursuits, like Big Talk, full time? 

Kalina: It's interesting, because I feel almost like a backwards entrepreneur. I didn't go into this wanting to be an entrepreneur, and it's still really hard for me to even accept that identity. What keeps me going over and over again is knowing there's an actual need, and that I do have an actual passion for this. As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly check in with yourself -  if you're not addressing an actual need or if you're not actually passionate, your idea isn’t going to have legs.  It's also not an overnight thing. It takes a lot of time to really build something. If it seems like something took shape overnight either that person had a lot of money or they didn't show how much actually led up to that outcome. You have to be super patient and accept that it's going to be very uncertain and weird and hard and that you're going to have impostor syndrome. But as long as you're passionate and as long as you're addressing a real human need, keep going, and it’ll be the most meaningful experience you'll ever have.

Rebecca: What are your plans for Big Talk in the short term and in the long term? 

Kalina: Within the next year, my immediate goal for Big Talk is to work with my co-founder of the business side of Big Talk and build out an educational curriculum for companies and schools to implement Big Talk in a more structured way. I want to develop a Big Talk mentality at companies and change the way of communicating. I want it to be the norm for people to be vulnerable, open, and meaningfully connected with their coworkers, while still working really well and efficiently. I want to start doing more Big Talk interviews with strangers again and do a Big Talk podcast or more videos. Also right now I sell the card game on Amazon, but it'd be so cool to get it into stores, get it translated into different languages, or to create different versions for different people's needs.

Long term, my vision for Big Talk is always to be able to use it as a tool for building empathy across cultures. That's something that I can hopefully address through another research project or by scaling the movement more. I've always been interested in using Big Talk as a peacebuilding tool in the government as well as helping out with mental health, loneliness, and different pervasive issues that are creeping up in society and really messing with people's minds and lives.