Laugh. Think. Cry.
Two keynotes for rooms that are tired of AI talks. No tools, no predictions, no slides full of logos.
One is about a valley. One is about a Russian psychologist who died in 1934. Both are about you.
Relearning Vygotsky
in the Age of AI.
A hundred-year-old idea, and what it asks of us now that intelligence is everywhere.
AI has made Vygotsky unavoidable again. We were taught that the zone of proximal development was a level inside a child, a readiness band on a slide. But his real claim was the opposite. Mind is social before it is individual, and the zone was never in the kid at all. It lives in the space between people.
Every higher function shows up twice: first between people, then inside the person.
Inner speech is just dialogue folded inward. You think because someone once thought alongside you and you kept the echo. So when we sit a child down alone and measure what they can do with every other human scrubbed out of the room, we are not measuring their intelligence. We are measuring the residue of collaborations they already finished. Vygotsky had a word for that.
Fossil.
Then the capable other became abundant. A hundred million kids started thinking out loud with a partner, which is the most Vygotskian thing that has ever happened in mass schooling , and we called it cheating. Maybe the question isn't what the kids are doing wrong. Maybe it's time to ask what we got wrong about the work.
Now let's stop measuring the fossil.
Keynote or full-staff professional development. 45–60 minutes, adjustable to the room.
Whole staffs, instructional leadership, and education conferences wrestling with AI, assessment, and what is worth measuring now.
Not a toolkit. A different pair of eyes. Language for the unease they already feel about grading in the age of AI, a frame that puts the teacher back at the center instead of the ruler, and an invitation to relearn Vygotsky with AI in the room.
Unforgetting
Ourselves.
Braided Love in the Age of AI
We're told the great divide of the AI age is between those who are good with the new tools and those who aren't. It isn't.
The real divide is between those who can stay unfakeably human, and those who are quietly forgetting how.
This keynote is about remembering. It makes the case for the two literacies this moment demands: perceptual literacy, our oldest, most embodied, least fakeable way of reading the world, and technical courage, the nerve to command these tools rather than be commanded by them. Together, they're how a person stays sovereign in a manufactured world instead of dissolving into it.
It's not a talk against technology. It's a talk against tenancy: against raising children to rent someone else's reality instead of authoring their own.
And he'll tell you about a mountain. About a single question he read on a rock beneath the Eastern Sierra: what if the land loved you back, as much as you love it. It is a question that reveals the one thing a screen can never do, and the thing our children are quietly starving for.
You won't leave with a toolkit. You'll leave seeing your students, your kids, and your own life a little differently.
Keynote or full-community evening. 25 minutes and up, adjustable to the room.
Whole communities: staff, parents, students, all ages, all backgrounds. Heart register, rooted in equity and dignity.
Earned emotion, not information. Language for what they already feel in their gut, and the nerve to act on it. Generations turn toward each other in the room.
Serious. Funny. Emotional.
Standup-tested in cold Seattle open-mic rooms. The funny is the entry fee for the cry. He gets the room laughing in the first three minutes, then earns the tears. And he goes first. He cries on stage, which is why it lands and never feels like a bit.
He implicates himself before anyone else: the guilty father at the restaurant handing over the iPad so he can eat in peace. Teachers are heroes, not culprits.
No tool parade, no tidy five steps. The thing worth keeping cannot be downloaded, so he refuses to pretend otherwise.
Builds AI with teenagers, raises his kids inside the same storm, came up through caste and an immigrant story. Speaks to manufactured hierarchy from the inside.
- ▸You want the room to feel something real, not just take notes.
- ▸You want AI handled as a human and justice question, not a product demo.
- ▸You serve a community of color or immigrant families and want dignity and sovereignty spoken from lived experience.
- ▸You are tired of both the doomers and the hype men and want the third path.
- ▹You want a “Top 10 AI Tools” session or a vendor showcase.
- ▹You want a neutral, no-edge corporate keynote that avoids emotion.
- ▹You need him to stay safely on the tool layer and never touch power, dignity, or sovereignty.
That honesty is the point. He'd rather be the right fit for the right stage than a safe fit for any stage.