Michael Ventura is the CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design firm that has worked with some of the world's largest and most important brands: from Johnson & Johnson, Pantone, and Adobe to the TED Conference, Delta Airlines and The Daily Show. While he wears many hats in his professional life, Michael can boil all his roles down to helping people and corporations overcome their most vexing challenges when it comes to personal development and understanding the obstacles when connecting with other people. Michael has served as a board member and advisor to a variety of organizations, including Behance, the Burning Man Project, Cooper-Hewitt, and the U.N.'s Tribal Link Foundation. He is also a visiting lecturer at institutions such as Princeton University and the United States Military Academy at West Point. In addition to these pursuits, Michael leads a thriving indigenous medicine practice, where he helps patients address illness and injury of all types on the road to better well-being. Applied Empathy, his first book, was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2018.

Nir Eyal, a prominent behavioral economist and author of 'Indistractable,' shares his journey from creating addictive tech to teaching others how to regain their focus. He reveals that distraction often stems from internal triggers rather than devices. Eyal debunks the myth of phone addiction, emphasizing intentional attention management instead. He discusses practical strategies for enhancing workplace productivity and self-control, advocating for introspection and a supportive culture to combat the overwhelming distractions of modern life.

For over a decade, AJ Harbinger has been helping people build confidence, deepen relationships, and create social capital. AJ has become one of the world’s top relationship development experts, and his company, the Art of Charm has become a leading training facility for top performers that want to overcome social anxiety, develop social capital and build relationships of the highest quality. Following the path set out for him by his family, AJ studied biology in college and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the University of Michigan. During this time, AJ realized he was struggling with social interactions and began exploring his interest in self-development. From this, The Art of Charm Podcast was born as AJ started recording episodes in the evenings. After seeing an opportunity to grow The Art of Charm, AJ made the difficult decision to leave the laboratory and graduate school and take a risky leap into the world of entrepreneurship. The Art of Charm Podcast would go on to become one of the largest and most successful lifestyle podcasts in the world. What started out as two graduate students conversing and laughing in a basement in Ann Arbor has turned into a top-rated podcast and highly sought after coaching business. Today, AJ and his co-founder at The Art of Charm teach people from all over the world how to create, develop, and maintain top business and personal relationships.

Nyla Rodgers is an activist, futurist, and non-profit leader with a passion for merging social impact with technology. She creates and runs organizations that transform communities, foster social entrepreneurship around the world, and advocates for greater generosity and partnership between the tech and non-profit worlds. Nyla began her non-profit work in 2007 when she founded Mama Hope, a grassroots training program that equips social entrepreneurs with the tools to raise funding and build sustainable communities. The group has since built schools, health clinics, children’s centers, clean water systems and food security projects that have improved the health and economic standing of over 813,000 people throughout Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India and the U.S. Nyla was inspired to create Mama Hope after her mother passed away of ovarian cancer. Before her death, she had raised $1,500 for a village in Kisumu, Kenya, and her gift made a massive impact, creating a bank that helped local women start their own businesses. Nyla is also is a Co-Producer of the Stop The Pity campaign aimed at shifting the stereotypes of the global poor. Its videos have garnered over 14M views and were featured on CNN and Al Jazeera as well as at the Sundance Festival and SXSW. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Global Citizen of the Year Award. In 2017 she was honored for her work as a Female Leader in Eileen Fisher’s Fall campaign “Power: In the Words of Women” and was profiled in Forbes under the headline: The Business of Hope: What It Takes and How One Woman Inspired it. Recently, her work in fundraising has led her to become an activist and philosopher in the cryptocurrency space where she is a speaker and advocate for greater generosity and altruism in the crypto community.

Lauren Billie is a force. She is currently designing an unprecedented future of racial, gender and economic equity through enterprise - instead of non-profits. She spends most of her time building and leading Allbodies, "the new way to do healthcare." Through a digital platform, they make make the patient experience easy, informative, holistic and empowering. They are starting with reproductive and sexual health, one of the most underserved and relevant health sectors; and serving millennial womxn, who have the largest spending power in US history. She gives her free time to progressive political and social justice organizing and plan to run for office in the next 15 years. She is interested in building coalitions with individuals, organizations and investors committed to doing things differently. On top of Allbodies.com, she is a parter at the mass meditation movement called The Big Quiet and also leads community for the Arena Summit, where she is convening, connecting and supporting the next generation of civic leaders.  

Radha is a community building savant. She is the co-Founder, CEO and Chief Community Architect of Daybreaker, the early morning dance and wellness move-ment that currently holds events in 25 cities and over a dozen college campuses around the world with a community of almost half a million people. She is a successful entrepreneur (Co-Founder THINX, LiveItUp), author, globe trotting speaker, DJ, inventor, and investor. Her new book BELONG answers the questions, "how the heck do I find my people?" and "How do I create large and meaningful communities in the real world?". She spent 18 months synthesizing her key methods for community building, peeling back the curtain on exactly what she and her team did (and continues to do) at Daybreaker so that anyone interested in creating their own community could have a blueprint for how to do it. She was named by MTV as “one of 8 women who will change the world.” Radha lives in Brooklyn NY with her love Eli and her twin sister Miki – and lots of family and friends within a few blocks. You can most often find her tinkering with new social experiments, community and experience design projects, speaking around the world, or on the dance floor at Daybreaker in New York City (if she’s not dancing at sunrise in another part of the world.)

In this lively discussion, Sam Horn, a communication expert and author, shares her insights on strategic branding and storytelling. She emphasizes the power of emotional storytelling in forging connections and the importance of concise pitching. Sam introduces her WAVE method for crafting engaging narratives and discusses balancing emotional appeal with factual data in pitches. With anecdotes from the Maui Writers Conference, she highlights the need for authenticity in storytelling and the transformative impact of sharing personal experiences.

Biet is this completely unique Spiritual Teacher with a rare Rock & Roll sensibility who was raised by an awakened Shaman who cured himself from near death in the woods of Russia. With that said, I think what makes her story even more special is the amount of adversity she has overcome. Losing most of her family to death as a young child growing up in NYC, tragedy turned into music and she got signed to Sony Records at 18, after that she had a near death experience, lost her 4 month old daughter Ula to S.I.D.S, had her house burn down, lived in the burned down house doing heroin for 4 months, her best friends hung himself and then her awakened teacher father died. After 5 years of heroin and cocaine addiction Biet got sober nearly 11 years ago and founded a meditation experience that she guides globally and scores with her own music. Her work is just as warm and intimate with a group of 12 people in a living room as it is with thousands of people on a stage. She has been called the "David Bowie of Meditation" by Television Host and Activist, Stacy London. She has been written up in FORBES, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, TIME & The New York Times.. just to name a few. She has partnered with Lululemon, Adidas and Sony to name just a couple. She has just released her first book with Simon & Schuster based on the 44 laws that prevent someone from enlightenment and is speaking all over the globe to spread the message of awakening and doing it in a down to earth way!

Max Stossel is an award-winning poet + filmmaker named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His performances across five continents, from Lincoln Center in NY to the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, have been described as mind expanding, profound, emotive, and hilarious all at once. His work has been translated to fourteen languages, won multiple film festivals, and has been viewed over 20 million times online. Max Stossel is also the Head of Education for the Center for Humane Technology, an organization of former tech insiders and CEOs dedicated to realigning technology with humanity’s best interests. Before joining CHT, Max was a media strategist with an extensive background in social, spending more time learning the ins and outs of the facebook algorithm than any human should. He ran social for multinational brands, and later worked for a social media company where he designed some of the same notification structures to distract students that he now criticizes. He provides a unique and much needed critical perspective on the role of technology in the classroom.  The merging of these fields allows Max to provide a fascinating perspective on modern content and culture. He is currently performing Words That Move in theatres, speaking or performing at schools, corporations & events, and helping select brands tell their stories in his style via video.

LAUREN HANDEL ZANDER is a life coach, university lecturer, public speaker, and the Co-Founder and Chairwoman of Handel Group®, an international corporate consulting and private coaching company based in New York City. Lauren is also the author of Maybe It’s You: Cut the Crap, Face Your Fears, Love Your Life (Published by Hachette Book Group, April 2017), a no-nonsense, practical manual that helps readers figure out not just what they want out of life, but how to actually get there. She has spent over 20 years coaching thousands of private clients: entrepreneurs, couples, families, professors, politicians, Emmy, Peabody and Academy Award-winning artists, Grammy-winning musicians and Fortune 500 CEOs. Her corporate clients have included executives from Sony BMG, The New York Times, News Corp, J. Walter Thompson Agency, Citibank, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Uniworld, The Gap Inc., BASF, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Vogue. She has fixed corporate business relationships, mediated contract negotiations, reconciled marriages, and helped resolve complex family issues. In the early 2000s, Lauren created a groundbreaking methodology, The Handel Method®, which is supported by top educators and psychologists, and has been taught in over 35 major universities and institutes of learning across the country.