Wow. I'm almost done watching iti right now, and didn't catch him saying 'right?' at all; maybe it happens in the earlier part, but in the last few minutes, none at all. If he's saying it, I hardly think it's meant as some subtle pysch trick.

Nor did I get the feeling that his claims of being wrong was in any way disingenuous. At worst it's a ploy to structure his talk.

Every TED talk works off the assumption that the speaker has some insight worth sharing with the audience, presumably non-obvious or non-trivial realizations, so of course he's going to try say something worth thinking about. There's nothing subtext about it; it's the whole point of being on stage.

My takeaway was not simply "for every Steve Jobs, we need a bunch of workers to actually build the iPods", but that there are a lot of seemingly oddball jobs done by happy people who did not bother to "follow their bliss", that conventional wisdom on what work might make you happy or how work should be approached might very well be wrong, and that plain old labor should not be looked down on.