Cannibals, chickens and catastrophes.
Event planners hire a speaker to solve a problem for a room. I solve two. I show teams that have stopped taking creative risks how honesty and humor build brands people trust, and I show people who have been knocked flat how to get up and take a different route. I know both from the inside.
I lived alone for year with dragons on a desert island, rebuilt a business after a bombing, and took an egg brand from a backyard in Austin to a billion dollars in revenue, with a chalkboard-esthetic and a pledge to tell customers the truth.
The humor I use to connect and communicate has never been the sign of an easy life. But sharing a smile and laughter can bridge cultural gulfs and build trust with people separated by millennia of isolation.
Through a career of almost 40 years, my resumé reads as if it belongs to several people, and not me alone.
I spent almost twenty years in South East Asia, first as a wildlife photographer and documentary maker, then as a restaurant owner, agency founder and brand builder in Bali.
In the United States I ran creative for e-commerce channels and consumer brands, including the one that grew into a public company, managing multi-million dollar accounts.
When life threw another curveball, I co-wrote a comedy feature with the writer of Dodgeball, built DiNKR, a community-first pickleball app with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and taught myself to write the code for it at 55.
One approach ran through all of it: find the rule your category takes for granted, break it in plain sight, and let people in on the joke.
I offer three talks. Each solves a different problem for a different room, and each sends your audience home with something tangible to think about come Monday.
Talk one: Take the Standing Count
For leadership offsites, all-hands meetings, associations and any audience living through change it did not choose.
You will be knocked down. By your own mistakes, by circumstances beyond your control, or by life on an ordinary Tuesday. I have been on the canvas more times than most: malaria and snakebite on an island at 23, a bombing that took a community and a business, the loss of my daughter at 16, the sight in one eye and a muscle in one leg. Each time the way back turned out to be the same. Take the count, get up, and go straight through the trees rather than along the path everyone else uses. Your audience leaves with a method they can run the next time they find themselves on the ground, and a story they will repeat at dinner.
Talk two: Straight Through the Trees
For founders, CMOs and in-house creative and marketing teams at consumer brands.
Established products get better by inches. Breakthroughs take a leap, and most teams have stopped leaping because a swing and a miss costs someone their job. I built brands in Bali where the category gave me nothing and a joke did the work, and I was in the room when a startup egg company decided to say out loud what the rest of the aisle was hiding. That decision, radical honesty delivered with a sense of humour, produced an EFFIE, a tenfold social following and a brand worth a billion dollars whose architecture is still intact. Your team leaves with three questions to ask about your own brand on Monday morning, and permission to answer them out loud.
Talk three: Nobody's Path
For high school and college audiences, career days, commencements and youth programmes.
At 18 you are told to pick a lane and that the lane decides the rest. I studied zoology, taught skiing in the Alps, got left on an island with a film camera, ran a pizza business, sold jewelry on a shopping channel, built a billion-dollar egg brand and taught myself to write apps in my fifties. None of it was the plan and all of it turned out to be useful later. Students leave knowing there is no path, that the knocks are the curriculum, and that the only wrong move is to stop moving.
Keynotes run 40 to 45 minutes. I also do 20-minute versions, fireside conversations, and half-day workshops for marketing and creative teams built around talk two. Every talk is tailored to the room; send me the audience and the brief and I will tell you which one fits.
Thank you!