The world is built by people with ideas. Scientists, founders, and philosophers create progress by discovering better explanations and sharing them with others. Yet many brilliant people struggle to communicate clearly when the stakes are high.
I help the people building the 21st century to speak clearly under pressure. Through The Ewing School, my team and I coach leaders behind major keynote speeches, breakthrough technologies, U.S. Supreme Court victories, multi-billion dollar development pitches, and a TED talk that received one of the longest standing ovations from the main stage in Vancouver.
I am particularly interested in the role speaking plays in human progress. The same forces that advance science, markets, and culture also help us communicate more clearly: openness and error correction.
My goal is to help more people share ideas that expand our capacity to work together to build a better world.
On our first date, my wife Maryrose and I swam across the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. We spent the night around a campfire under the stars and floated home the next day on truck tire inner tubes.
A year later we were on the Yellowstone River in Montana when a converted school bus rolled past. Maryrose turned to me and said, “I could live in a bus.”
I thought, “Let’s do it.”
We found a bus, gave away most of our stuff, and lived nomadically. We fell in love with a town tucked into the Rockies called Durango. Today we live there, on the Animas River, with our children, Pearson and Annabelle.
Our kids are teaching me that a key part of growing up is shifting our attention from “please look at me” to “I see you.” Fatherhood reveals how much joy and freedom emerge from that shift.
I am fascinated by awe and wonder: campfires, night skies, deep friendships, good conversations, ideas that change how you see the world, beautiful music, old books, nature, and the astonishing ability of people to work together.
What impresses me most is how well humans cooperate across time and space. Almost everything around me exists because countless people who don’t know me and whom I will never meet collaborated to create things that make my family’s lives better. The more I learn about that process, the more miraculous humanity appears.