What's the Big Idea with Andrew Horn

Sara Ness is the Founder and Chief Instigator of Authentic Revolution. She began teaching Authentic Relating in 2012, founding a thousands-strong learning community in Austin, Texas and going on to train over 350 leaders and help found 30+ other communities worldwide. Sara is passionate about exposing the joy of human connection and exploring our creative potential through relationship. She has facilitated at schools, companies, yoga studios, a funeral, Burning Man, and more, bringing playful social technology into the mainstream and the non-mainstream.

Aaron Rose is a transformational coach for public figures, inclusive culture consultant, motivational speaker and human being committed to changing and enjoying the world at the same time. He is devoted to healing our crisis of separation and political polarization by designing radically inclusive community cultures, facilitating individual recovery from trauma and isolation, and empowering the next generation of changemakers to lead the way. Aaron has facilitated cultural transformation across multiple industries, from wellness and spirituality to tech and finance, using a unique mix of restorative justice, neuroscience, metaphysics, and meditation. His clients have included McKinsey & Co, Columbia University, Greenpeace, T-Mobile, and more. As a transformational coach and energy worker, Aaron helps public figures transcend their fears of criticism and embrace their unique role in building a better world. Having experienced both violent discrimination and unfounded privilege during his journey as a transgender man, Aaron is a champion of a world where we are celebrated for our unique incarnations while also transcending the labels that keep us divided.

Arjuna is a writer, public speaker and executive coach, who has trained more than 2000 coaches over the last 25 years.  He is the author of nine books, including the 2005 #1 National Bestseller The Translucent Revolution. His latest book, Radical Brilliance, is the anatomy of how and why people have original ideas which change the world.  He has been a speaker at conferences all over the world, including at Google and the United Nations. He lives with his wife, Chameli in Nevada City, California. They have two grown sons and two mischievous kittens.

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.