Speaking

WHAT THIRTY YEARS BEHIND A BAR TAUGHT ME ABOUT BEING HUMAN

WHAT THIRTY YEARS BEHIND A BAR TAUGHT ME ABOUT BEING HUMAN

For thirty years, I have stood on the other side of the bar and watched humanity unfold in front of me.

Weddings and divorces. Births and deaths. Fights and friendships. Loneliness, addiction, celebration, sex, money, religion, failure and love.

A bartender occupies a strange place in society. Part servant. Part storyteller. Part psychologist. Part referee. Part priest.

This talk is about what three decades of serving people taught me about fear, ego, compassion, chaos, resilience—and what it means to be human.

TALK TWO

THE ART OF CREATIVE DISRUPTION

Creativity is not about making people comfortable. It is about making them feel something. This talk explores why the ideas that make us uncomfortable are often the ones worth examining—and why businesses, artists, and individuals become forgettable when they become afraid to take risks. Drawing from thirty years in hospitality, building businesses, making art, writing, and martial arts, I talk about the value of disruption, failure, humor, offense, curiosity, and refusing to live by someone else's definition of success. The goal isn't to teach people how to think. It's to make them question why they think the way they do.

TALK THREE

THE TRUTH ABOUT ALL THINGS

 Life is a joke.
That's the good news.

We spend our lives taking ourselves terribly seriously—trying to succeed, trying to avoid suffering, trying to understand why we're here, and desperately trying to control a life that refuses to cooperate. But what if we've misunderstood the joke? The Truth About All Things explores a different possibility: that underneath all our searching, suffering, ambition, religion, fear, and ridiculous human drama is something much simpler.

You are the one you're praying to.

 What if God isn't somewhere outside of us watching the story unfold? What if we are God, temporarily lost inside our own creation—playing the greatest practical joke imaginable on ourselves? Drawing from philosophy, personal experience, humor, tragedy, and the strange coincidences we call miracles, this talk explores what happens when we stop treating existence as a problem we're supposed to solve. Maybe enlightenment isn't discovering the meaning of life.

Maybe it's finally getting the joke

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Available for conferences, universities, hospitality groups, businesses, creative organizations, and private events. Talks can be adapted to fit the audience, from hospitality and leadership to creativity, philosophy, and the strange business of being human.

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