After graduating from Harvard Business School, Neil Pasricha spent a decade as Director of Leadership at Walmart, the world’s largest company. While there he wrote the 50-million-hit, award-winning blog 1000 Awesome Things and the New York Times bestsellers The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation which have been on international bestseller lists for over 200 weeks and sold over a million copies. Neil’s research and books on happiness, mindset, and human potential have received attention from Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times, CNN, and BBC. Onstage his style is an endangered species: an incredibly rare blend of raw, hilarious, and heartwarming. His high-energy, takeaway-laden, application-not-motivation speeches are often voted tops at any conference or event.

---What is it that pushes us to perform at our best? Which people on our teams thrive in high-stress/high-stakes environments and which are always cool, and calm under pressure? Why does this matter and how can you use it to drive peak performance? After 3 years of interviewing more than 200 people including professional athletes, military officers, poker players, and psychologists, Rafi Kohan offer insights into the psychology of gamesmanship and how mental stress can be used to drive performance and behavior. This work, which culminated into the lively and hilarious read Trash Talk, The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage, offers anecdotes from some of the world’s top competitors and the mind games that push them to outperform their opponents.

Tripp Crosby is a comedic host, inspirational speaker, and filmmaker who is at this very moment writing about himself in the third person. It’s very, very possible that you’ve seen his most popular comedy sketch called “A Conference Call in Real Life”. This video is one of, if not the most popular workplace related comedy sketches of all time and possibly the only YouTube video to ever go viral twice: Once when Tripp first created it in 2013 and again in 2020 when the painful experience of participating in conference calls became an even more relatable topic.