Ambassador Enterprises, Daryle AI Launch
Date: 2025
What if life, human history, and our place in it is nothing but a string of words? In this talk, I introduced three artifacts from different parts of history—each pointing toward what physicists call a singularity: an event so powerful that the old rules no longer apply. The first artifact: a 1950 paper by Alan Turing that opened with a ridiculous question—"Can machines think?" That question became the foundation of artificial intelligence and, eventually, the large language models reshaping every industry today. The second artifact: a passage from Aristotle's Politics, written 23 centuries before the first computer. Aristotle imagined a world where tools could work by themselves—eliminating the need for human labor. We are now living in the world he only dreamed of. The third artifact: Daryle AI—a platform we built for the Ambassador Enterprises ecosystem. My argument: the most powerful technology humanity has ever created isn't a bigger hammer. It's a machine that can join the conversation. Because language makes us human. And now, for the first time in history, we've built something that can speak back.
Work & Flourishing Summit | Harvard University
Date: 2025
I sat down with Bill Yeargin, CEO of Correct Craft—a billion-dollar company with 21 brands, a culture pyramid, and a CEO who still answers his own email. We've all heard "culture eats strategy for breakfast." But I wanted to push further: What if culture is the breakfast? The eggs. The coffee. The waffle maker. Bill gave me stories. How Correct Craft's mission—"making life better"—shows up not in the boardroom but in the mundane: the hallway conversation, the hiring decision, the deals they walked away from because the numbers were right but the values weren't. We explored how you unify culture across 21 brands without cloning it. We talked about what gets lost when culture gets cut from the budget. And we ended with the question Bill is still asking himself—because real culture work isn't a checklist. It's a conversation that never finishes.
Work & Flourishing Summit | Harvard University
Date: 2024
I opened with a question most executives don't want to sit with: Are we losing the art of wonder about what it means to be human? The room got quiet. We live in an age of datafication—where performance metrics drive decisions, dashboards define success, and humans get reduced to data points on a spreadsheet. Numbers matter. But somewhere along the way, we started believing the numbers are the meaning. They're not. Humans are not formulas waiting to be calculated. We are stories. Wonders. Irreducible mysteries that no algorithm can fully capture. In this talk, I challenged a room full of executives to ask a harder question: What if our obsession with measurement is costing us the very thing we're trying to optimize? The invitation: build workplaces that foster not just productivity but purpose. Not just performance but presence. Not just results but relationships. Let the metrics serve the humans—not the other way around.
Ambassador Enterprises, Learning Time
Date: 2022
I asked a room full of professionals a question they weren't expecting: Is your gratitude a debt—or a gift? We think we know what gratitude means. We say "thank you" a hundred times a week. But where did the idea come from? And what if we've been practicing a diminished version of it all along? In this talk, I traced gratitude through 2,400 years of human thought. Aristotle bound it to duty—a debt owed, a ledger balanced. Adam Smith gave it new texture, weaving it into the fabric of moral sentiment. Modern neuroscience now watches it light up the brain like a warm fire. But the radical turn came from an unexpected source. Jesus didn't just teach gratitude. He relocated it. He moved it out of the economy of justice—where every gift demands repayment—and into the economy of love. A place where God gives to both the good and the evil, expecting nothing in return. That changes everything. I introduced two frameworks: Gratitude as Repayment (transactional, bounded, keeping score) and Gratitude as Recognition (relational, free, rooted in love). The audience assessed themselves. Most discovered they'd been living in the first economy while longing for the second. The invitation: Stop placing others in debt. Start recognizing the beauty in the giving itself. Gratitude, rightly understood, isn't a ledger. It's a way of living—one that shapes not just our relationships, but the shared history we're writing together.
Yale University, Graduation Ceremony, Pennington Center
Date: 2022
I addressed a Hall full of Yale seniors—triumphant, terrified. They had carved their way through long nights, hard exams, stress, and tears. Now they were about to walk across a stage, collect a piece of paper, and step into... what exactly? That was my question. Not "What's your plan?" Everyone asks that. I asked something harder: Who will you become in the space between who you are now and who you haven't yet imagined? There's a paradox hiding inside every graduation: endings are beginnings in disguise. Finality is just a threshold wearing a mask. I took them on a journey—through the collapse of ancient empires that sparked eras of innovation. Through biology, where decay isn't death but fuel for the next cycle of life. Through the history of ideas, where revolutions of thought only emerge when the old falls away. Economists call it creative destruction. Artists call it the blank canvas. Mystics call it the dark night before dawn. I called it the gap—the space between what's done and what's possible. And I told them the truth: that gap is not a void to fear. It's where the magic lives. It's where you get made. The degree is proof of what you've done. The gap is an invitation to who you might become. Step into it.
Princeton University, Currents & Perspectives in World Christianity
Date: 2021
The room held scholars from six continents—scholars, historians, sociologists—gathered at Princeton to wrestle with one of the defining questions of our age: How do we live together across difference? Here's the tension no one wants to name: in our rush to celebrate pluralism, we sometimes blur the very distinctions that make each perspective meaningful. Harmony becomes homogeny. Inclusion becomes erasure. And in trying to honor everyone, we end up honoring no one fully. But what if unity isn't the goal? What if understanding is? Every tradition—whether religious, cultural, or philosophical—is a small civilization unto itself. Built on pillars shaped by centuries of history, conviction, and lived experience. These aren't interchangeable chapters in the same book. They're different libraries altogether. To flatten them is to lose them. I offered a different path: friendship across difference. Not forced agreement. Not lowest-common-denominator consensus. But the slow, patient work of relational engagement—meals shared, questions asked, stories exchanged. The kind of connection formed not by erasing difference but by sitting with it. This is where genuine dialogue begins. Not in the conference room of managed consensus, but in the kitchen of honest difference. My challenge to the room—these brilliant minds who had traveled thousands of miles to think better together about pluralism and identity: stop engineering harmony. Start cultivating relationships. Create spaces where understanding grows not through the blurring of identities—but through the strengthening of them.
Yale University, Chapel Service, Pennington Center
Date: 2021
Every civilization has imagined divinity the same way: powerful, majestic, above it all. A force that rules the heavens and controls the fates of humanity. The cross shatters that image. In this chapel service, I explored a radical idea—drawn from Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God: What if divinity is revealed not through power, but through the surrender of it? The crucifixion tells a story the world doesn't know how to read. Not victory as we understand it—but defeat. Not dominance—but vulnerability. A God who chose to lose in order to win something far greater: solidarity with humanity. This isn't weakness dressed up as theology. It's an inversion of everything we think we know about authority and strength. The invitation was personal: What would it look like to lay down your power? To lead by surrender? To stop grasping and start opening? Because it's in those moments of vulnerability—when we finally let go—that we discover a unity we could never have engineered. The cross doesn't ask us to dominate. It asks us to descend. And in the descent, we find each other.
Harvard University, 13th Academic Conference on Social Sciences, Virtual
Date: 2020
Democracy. Religious freedom. Pluralism. Noble ideals—until they collide. In a world of polarized discourse, can these values coexist? Can they actually work together for the common good? I brought research to the question. Fifty universities. Hundreds of students. One clear finding. University programs that force theological consensus—all in the name of diversity and inclusion—fail. They flatten identity. They breed resentment. They achieve the opposite of what they intend. But interfaith friendships? They work. Not by erasing religious identity—but by strengthening it. Not by demanding agreement—but by creating space for honest difference. I've seen these friendships shimmer with something the programs can't manufacture: a human spirit that lifts students beyond the divisions of religion, politics, and tribe. Connection formed not through consensus, but through curiosity. Through meals shared. Questions asked. Respect offered without requiring conversion. The finding is simple but countercultural: stop engineering agreement. Start cultivating relationships. Friendship invites students to engage without forcing consensus. To listen without the need to agree. To hold their convictions and still make room for another. That's the only pluralism that actually holds.
Brown University, Metcalf Auditorium
Date: 2019
Has there ever been a force more central to our existence than love? It courses through the veins of every human, threading itself into every culture, every age, every heart that’s ever beat. And yet, we never really stop to study it—not in any meaningful way. Sure, we have our Freud, our Romanticism and evolutionary psychologists, our labs with electrodes and charts, but that’s not the whole of it, is it? Love is lived, not studied. And all of us have lived its power. We search for it, sacrifice for it, and suffer for it, without ever pausing to ask: What is it, really? In this talk, I posed that very question to the audience—collected their responses, their definitions—and in the end, the answer seemed to be just this: LOVE IS. No conditions, no qualifiers. Simply that—love is. It is the force that pulls us toward one another, that compels us to see another as they are, in all their complexity and contradiction, and still say yes. It’s a way of accepting, of affirming, of valuing someone just as they are—human, flawed, complicated, and, in that humanity, worthy. And if love is beyond our emotions, a way of affirming or ascribing value to others, imagine how different our world would be if we started to love more people—even those who are nothing like us, even our enemies. Love is a way of being in the world. It allows us to transcend the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out, to see the human beneath the labels. It’s messy and beautiful, capable of transforming the course of our race. Because in the end, to love someone is to say: You matter. You are seen. And that’s enough to start building a flourishing future.
Brown University, Weeekly Leadership Lecture Series, Metcalf Auditorium
Date: 2019
It's the question that finds us at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling: Who am I? And why am I the only species asking? In this lecture, I took students on a cross-disciplinary journey through the capacities that set us apart. Descartes gave us mind-body dualism—the radical claim that we possess reason and will, not just instinct. Chomsky revealed the Language Acquisition Device: an innate capacity for complex language that lets us argue philosophy, write poetry, and debate pizza toppings with equal fervor. Davidson and Hauser went further—arguing that our ability to generate new concepts across domains is the signature of human cognition. We don't just think. We synthesize. We connect what shouldn't connect. Carroll showed how we create meaning through art, literature, and culture. We're the species that paints like Van Gogh and writes lyrics like Kendrick Lamar—not for survival, but for significance. Corballis and Suddendorf introduced mental time travel: the ability to revisit the past and rehearse the future. This is how Edison iterated toward the lightbulb. How you learn from last semester and imagine next year. And Yalom reminded us that mortality is not a bug—it's a feature. The awareness of death is precisely what drives us to seek meaning, connection, and love beyond ourselves. My argument: human flourishing isn't found in one capacity alone. It lives in the integration—where reason, emotion, spirit, and body work together. We are not just minds. Not just hands. Not just hearts. We are all of it. And leadership begins with understanding what that means.
Harvard University, Leadership Lecture, W.S. Fong Auditorium
Date: 2019
Metaphors don't just color our language. They shape our reality. In this interactive lecture, I explored a deceptively simple idea: the figures of speech we use aren't decorations—they're architectures. They frame how we perceive, believe, and behave. Consider this: we speak of arguments as war. We attack positions. Defend claims. Win or lose. But what if we spoke of arguments as dance? Partners moving together. Rhythm. Response. The goal not victory—but connection. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, that shift in language could transform how we engage with disagreement itself. I took the audience through metaphors hiding in plain sight—across art, poetry, and science. Picasso's Guernica as a metaphor for the chaos of war. Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as a metaphor for choice and consequence. The metaphors physicists use to make quantum mechanics and cosmology graspable to the human mind. Then I made it personal. Midway through, I invited audience members to surface their own identity metaphors—the inner narratives that frame how they see themselves. Am I a builder? A wanderer? A warrior? A gardener? They wrote them down. Shared them with strangers. And discovered how these quiet metaphors shape their relationships—with themselves and everyone around them. The argument: when we recognize the metaphors that define us, we gain the power to change them. And when we change them, we unlock new futures. Language isn't just how we describe the world. It's how we build it.
Harvard University, Leadership Lecture, Harvard-Yenching Library
Date: 2018
Above the entrance to Emerson Hall, carved in stone, is a question that has greeted students for over a century: "What is man that you are mindful of him?" Standing before a Harvard audience for the first time, I couldn't shake it. That question—ancient, unresolved—became my starting point. I walked the audience through seven thinkers who tried to answer. Descartes, who staked everything on rational thought. Rousseau, who believed in our innate goodness. Darwin, who placed us within evolution's unfolding story. Freud, who revealed the wars within. Marx, who exposed the structures that bind us. Maslow, who mapped our hierarchy of needs and longings. And Derrida, who arrived at the end to dismantle the whole enterprise with postmodern doubt. Each thinker offered a frame. A lens. A way of seeing ourselves and others. But I didn't stop there. Beyond the theories, I urged the audience toward a deeper claim: that human dignity is not an accident of history or a conclusion of philosophy. It is not something we earn or argue into existence. We are beings made with purpose—reflecting something far greater than ourselves. And in understanding that, we come closer to understanding what it truly means to be human. The question above the door doesn't have a final answer. But it has a direction. And that direction points upward.