Keynote & Featured Conference Speakers
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Keynote Speakers
Shawn Achor
Shawn Achor is the NYTimes bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential. Shawn graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.
After spending 12 years at Harvard, Shawn traveled to 50 countries studying how to create an interconnected approach to potential and happiness. He has now worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies, and at places like NASA, the NFL, and the Pentagon. Shawn has battle-tested his research in high challenge environments from working with all the public schools in Flint Michigan, to six battalions of Marines at Camp Pendleton, to government leaders at Camp David, to students in a shantytown in Soweto South Africa, to hospitals in the wake of a mass shooting in Orlando and the Boston bombing. In every place Shawn has found the optimism can be increased through mindset and behavioral change, and that by creating an interconnected approach to happiness and success, we shine brighter together. Shawn's research made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 20 million views, and his lecture airing on PBS has been seen by millions.
Sam Rad
Sam Rad (Samantha Radocchia) is a lifelong student of humanity - futurist, anthropologist, and entrepreneur.
She is the founder of Radical Next, a meta-media studio creating transformative stories, experiences, and media productions that shape a positive future. Her upcoming book by the same name, Radical Next: Thriving in Times of Radical Change explores how "radical next ideas" and technologies will transform societies in the decades to come.
A charismatic speaker and performer, Sam has shared stories of radical change with global audiences on stages across 5 continents - empowering individuals, leaders, and organizations not only to survive, but to thrive through radical and accelerating change. She's advised the United Nations, WEF, Federal Reserve Bank, to name a few.
She was trained in anthropology, engineering, and symbolic systems, studying simulated and immersive realities - pushing the bounds of human consciousness and connection through her work. She was amongst the first anthropologists to conduct ethnographic research living in the virtual world "Second Life" in 2009.
Her work as a futurist has led Sam on a Journey of working with a range of frontier technologies, indigenous and emerging social structures, people, places, and practices. She refers to herself as an archaeologist of the future, as Fredric Jameson coined -- applying a traditional anthropological ethnographic approach to envisioning and illustrating future possibilities.
Just as a small shard of pottery unlocks insight into past civilizations, a seemingly unremarkable detail in the present offers a window into infinite future possibilities and realities. Sam carefully reconstructs fragmented visions of what was, what is, and what can be.
A four-time entrepreneur, Sam has served across multiple founding executive roles across the C-Suite. She was previously co-founder of NYOUM (previously LOVE), a London-based Generative AI communication platform, and Chronicled, a San Francisco-based blockchain company bringing trust to global commerce and supply chains. Prior to Chronicled, Sam founded two companies leveraging AI to map personal taste. Sam holds several patents linking the physical and digital worlds and is considered a pioneer in Applied Cryptography, Blockchain systems, Artificial intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Immersive Realities, and Simulations. She is noted as inventing the protocols which would lead to ERC-721 or Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
Sam is the author of the #1 Best Seller, Bitcoin Pizza: The No Bullshit Guide to Blockchain, writes as a contributor to Forbes, an was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Sam is passionate about empowering humanity to thrive in times of radical change. It is her mission to restore trust and connections between people and themselves, their source, each other, all beings, and our planet.
True to her "Rad" name, Sam is no stranger to risk and has accumulated over 700 jumps as a competitive skydiver.