Every significant speech ever delivered, by anyone, forever
The Speakola website launched on the 5th of August, 2015. It's ten years old this week. Here is the story of how it came to be.
I was sitting next to my brother, Ned, when I told him I was going to make a site that housed every significant speech ever delivered, by anyone, forever. We were at a 20 year celebration for Showtime United, the indoor soccer team he’s played in since he was a schoolkid, and I’d been invited because I filled in as goalie once. They’re very loyal in that sense. I’ve yet to tell my immediate family that I’m on the list for Vegas and the thirty year anniversary. My contribution is still that I filled in as goalie once.
The idea of starting a speeches site had been buzzing around for a while, particularly following the death of my best man Chris Daffey in 2013 and the experience writing his eulogy. The Obama years were ending, and whatever dissatisfaction people had with how much hope there’d been and how much change had been delivered, it’s difficult to argue with the quality of the speeches. It was also the moment when video started to dominate social media, and I thought that if my site was home to the majority of the world’s great speeches, they would be shared around the globe and there’d be millions of hits, and the thing might even be a money earner!
What I didn’t know was that the social media sites were also training their algorithms to spit in the face of third party links, and that the glory days of aggregation were over. As it’s eventuated, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been relatively unimportant to Speakola. It didn’t matter that some guy called Garima Verma with zero tweets and 35 followers has had the @speakola handle, and I was pushed towards @spekaola_ with an underscore. What has been crucial to Speakola is Google. In 2015, there really wasn’t a speeches site that did this speech library job well (American Rhetoric is good, but all US speeches) and as a result, many of the great speeches in history found a strong searchable home on Speakola.
At some point in that indoor soccer dinner, somebody gave a speech about the glory of Showtime United and Ned jokingly asked if it was good enough to put on this famous speeches site I was going to create. It was then that a second penny dropped. I wouldn’t just do famous speeches. I’d put up any type of speech users wanted to preserve, or that I liked. If I added ‘everyday’ speeches, then everyday people would visit the site, if only to assist in writing their eulogies, wedding speeches, birthday speeches, retirement speeches etc etc.
‘This is going to be massive,’ I said to Ned. I was a bit drunk, so I told him to remind me the next day that I was going to make a smash hit website that elevated the spoken word, preserved great moments in history, strengthened oral storytelling amongst communities and families, and transformed me into what we now think of as a tech bro, with a mahogany yacht and my shirt off and my guns out and those trillions of hits — as the world sobbed together over the power of speeches like the pre execution statements of Sacco and Vanzetti, ‘I am never be guilty, never!’
What, you’re not into Sacco and Vanzetti? Look it's possible I’m not amazing at assessing global pop trends. The person who has assisted me most with Speakola design and tech issues is a friend by the name of Mike Fink (brother of ‘Ange & The Boss’ collaborator Cam Fink), and despite being a media and words junkie, Mike has on a few occasions said something like, ‘I’m not sure everyone likes speeches as much as you, Tone — I know I don’t’.
He’s usually attempting to dampen my expectations, which is good, because they started off unrealistically high. In 2015, I visited web designers to see if they’d create a platform for me where popular speeches rose to the top, and there’d be feature speeches on the homepage, and my own speechly algorithm would suggest speeches people might like because they’d viewed a related speech and it’d be an app you’d find as #14 and rising in the App Store. I remember meeting with a hip well dressed team in a conference room in Collingwood, and they seemed to get what I was after, and the décor was really trendy and appealing, and the coffee they’d offered me was excellent, and it was only going to cost me $35,000 for them to build a prototype.
So I did what Mike told me to do — ‘Make a B version’ he said. ‘Just load speeches into Squarespace and set it up with very few bells and whistles. I’ll help you pick a template that sorts the categories for you. It’ll just cost you your own time and A$200 a year. Then you can work out if anyone wants to watch or listen to speeches. I know I don’t.’
In June of 2015, I started loading famous speeches. My strategy was to look for lists already in existence – ‘The 25 best speeches of the 20th Century’ and that sort of thing. I decided that for each speech I would include speaker name, title, date, location, embed video (or photograph if no embed) and most importantly, transcript. I figured that the only thing really separating what was to become Speakola from YouTube, which also houses great speeches, was discoverability and transcript. So every time I added a speech, I either searched up text or made my own transcript, often using Rev.com.
For a while I was going to call it ‘Speakeasy’ or ‘Speakezy’ and I had a go at registering domains related to that. Then I hit on Speakola, which sounded speechy and neat and I think Mike or my wife Tamsin liked it more than Speakeasy.
These were the first political speeches I added. They probably all came from the same list.
I contacted media friends and relatives and regular folk I knew had delivered a good speech and asked them if they had one I could add to the library. When I launched the site on August 5th 2015, I figured that an ‘ordinary person’ eulogy would kick start the project more than just another facebook outing for ‘I Have a Dream’ or the Gettysburg Address. So the first speech I ever promoted on Speakola, was Damian Callinan’s eulogy for his mother Kathleen. It was good choice because it’s a beautiful and funny speech, and there is a delicate pull between the most unbearable of tragedies and quite exhilarating moments of humour. When I looked a week ago, Damian’s eulogy for his Mum has had over 10,000 views, not quite keeping pace with Eric Idle’s eulogy for George Harrison (#6 ranked speech overall with 100,039 views) but still the number one non celebrity eulogy. Damian was also the frist guest on the Speakola podcast when that began in 2020. I’ve made sixty episodes since those lockdown beginnings, and only today was knocked back for an interview by Reese Witherspoon. Still, with a staff of one, it’s had over 200,000 downloads, and I’ve had guests such as Andrew Denton, Neil Kinnock, Anna Quindlen, Hong Kong’s Unmasked Portestor, Rana Hussein, Peter Malinauskas, Adam Elliot, Ram Guha and Ted Baillieu. I'‘ve learned how to use a high definition zoom H6 recorder, and the Audacity editor. I’ve had an avocados sponsorship, and received a box of three dozen green skin and purple skin avocados as podcast contra. I’ve failed to press record, I’ve failed to upload, I’ve failed to adjust levels, I’ve failed to hit the charts. But I have succeeded in recording 60 hours of interviews with speakers about their speecehes. I am the Song Exploder of the speech world. Every time, I’m stunned that we don’t rocket to number one in ‘Culture’. I’m reminded again of Mike’s words: ‘‘I’m not sure everyone likes speeches as much as you, Tone — I know I don’t’.
But here’s the thing. People do like speeches, Mike. Or at the very least, their teachers and university professors force them to look them up. As of today, there are 7382 subscribers to the Speakola newsletter, and only about 300 of those are people who tried to subscribe to
and accidentally subscribed to me to on their recommendation prompt. The rest like speeches Mike! Even in the last ten minutes, a shitload of people have visited Speakola, and here is what they are looking at:
Is that too small to see? Good. Take it from me that e Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, Jacqui Lambie and Pope John Paul II are playing on computers around the world. If you’re an Indian or American and don’t know who Jacqui Lambie is, if you’ve never heard ‘Dream a little cheaper’, have a listen to this. The glory of Speakola is that that speech gets remembered, or at least noted down in a little corner of the internet. What a voice Jacqui Lambie has. She’s knocked me back for the podcast too.
The numbers of visitors to Speakola these last ten years are extrordinary — maybe not beyond my wildest dreams, becasue my dreams were pretty wild in 2015, but something to be proud of nonetheless. Speakola has had 6.529 million visits, and 8.4 million pageviews. Yesterday, 2,344 people opened a Speakola page. The most traffic I ever had in a single night was 102,000 visits, when Eric Idle tweeted out his eulogy for George Harrison and it was picked up on the front page of Reddit.
Forty seven percent of Speakola traffic originates in the USA, 10 percent in my home country of Australia. I’ve had 250 visits from Zimbabwe, 383 from Lebanon. It’s truly a worldwide resource. I’m proud of that too. I always intended to house at least one speech from every country of the world. That’s going to be a project for the next couple of years.
If you’ve been a reader these last ten years, thanks for being a part of the journey. If you’ve been a speech contributor or podcast guest or sharer or commenter, thanks for your time and enthusiasm. If you’re a paid subscriber or Patreon supporter, I’m incredibly grateful.
My jobs over the next few months include my Speakola ‘gardening’, pulling out the weeds of broken links, adding new speeches, answering emails, adding new speeches. Suggestions are always welcome.
Have you got a favourite 2025 speech? Have you spotted a mistake or broken link on Speakola? Should I keep the whole enterprise going? (it’s very time consuming and not really a proper paying job. It currently makes less than US$7000 a year)? Is there a grant or something it would qualify for? Should I embark upon Speakola Live salons in 2026, where people deliver speeches, both famous and otherwise to audience? And finally, should I go to Vegas with Ned’s indoor soccer team. I did only fill in once.
Feel free to share a Speakola memory in the comments. I hope it’s offered you something, and contributed a little bit to the world.
Best wishes
Tony Wilson
Thank you so much for building this site. Your work is deeply appreciated. I love speeches. I love great writing as well, but for me the difference between an essay and a speech is like the difference between hearing a song on the radio and hearing that song live in concert.
Love it. Thanks. I like speeches.