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Speaking & Consulting

Our problem isn’t speed or information; it’s that we’ve lost public knowledge

of what matters, and no technology can code that back into us.

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Public Speaking

Brandon Rickabaugh Public Speaking

The Most Important
Questions in a New Context

While culture a shifting and technology grasps at the future the oldest questions feel urgent again. Questions about knowing what is real and what’s fiction, what makes us uniquely human, and live lives of goodness and unique meaning.​

 

But the conversation is crowded with noisefear, hype, and misinformation.

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Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, technology, and cultural imagination, I help audiences see with clarity, think with creativity, and recover the courage to live meaningfully in a digital age.

Key Topics

Am I Replaceable?

 

What Makes Us Human

If an AI can mimic your voice, your writing, your work, even your dating profile, what’s left that’s uniquely you? Imagine waking up to find your job description is rewritten for an AI system that sounds just like you. Or that you partner has been dating an intimacy app they claim is more attentive than you. I press a deeper question: what can’t be automated, and what makes human persons unique and irreplaceable.

Love, Loneliness & the Illusion of Connection

If 10,000 followers can’t cure your loneliness can AI? A friend told me their AI chatbot “understood them better than their spouse.” That’s not science fiction. It’s happening now. This talk explores how love and friendship risk being hollowed out, and what real intimacy still demands. ​​

The Consciousness Question

 

Can AI Feel or Explain You?

We can build machines that out-calculate, out-analyze, and out-predict us. But can they ever be conscious? Can we ever explain the origin of consciousness by building AGI. This talk uses recent work in neuroscience, AI development, and philosophy to analyze questions AI cannot answer: Why do you experience anything at all? Does consciousness point to something beyond matter? And what does that mean for the future of minds, souls, and God in a world run by machines?

What AI Reveals about the Spiritual Life

AI impresses us with imitation, but its greatest gift may be the questions it raises about what can’t be copied: the soul. This talk explores how AI, far from replacing the spiritual life, reveals the inexhaustible depth of the kind of spiritual life that many are looking for. And it isn't found in AI.

Truth in a Culture of Noise & Manipulation?

From deepfakes of politicians to AI-generated news, we’re living in a world where truth and fiction blur at the speed of a scroll. The reality is that we can reclaim the nature of truth and knowledge. And forgetting this has made life unsatisfying. Cultivating attention and discernment is now a survival skill.​

Brandon Rickabaugh Public Speaking

Planning an event or initiative? Request availability with your goals, audience, and date.

Consulting

First Principles for

New Technologies

Vision and Values Alignment

for Creative AI Use and Innovation

Technology is not a mere tool. Technology reshapes your mission, the people you work with and serve and your vision of the good. The most forward-thinking leaders now recognize: AI is not just a technical challenge, but a moral and spiritual one.

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I help organizations and leaders navigate the ethical, cultural, and spiritual impact of developing technologies—especially AI development and use—by aligning technological innovation with enduring wisdom and empirical research.​

Image by XR Expo

SPECIFIC OUTCOMES

Leaders

  • Set a mission-first AI strategy that advances human flourishing and trust.

  • Stand up lightweight, accountable governance (purpose, principles, decision rights, red lines).

  • Shape culture and capability—train teams, protect attention, reward wise use over hype.

  • Measure what matters with human-centered KPIs and iterate toward durable value.

Developers

  • Start human-first—define the good you want to cause, then build backward.

  • Integrity by design—provenance, eval rubrics, uncertainty disclosure, safe defaults.

  • Dignity in the interface—protect attention, agency, and relationships with every click.

  • Reversible by default—feedback loops, audit trails, and a real off-switch.

Organizations

  • Create a clear decision tree to know when AI fits your missions, when it doesn’t, and why.

  • Pilot with purpose: scoped, measurable, opt-in, and reversible by design.

  • Prefer convivial alternatives when they beat automation on care, quality, or trust.

  • Install exit criteria and audits to prevent dependency, drift, and hidden harms.

Who I Work With

My consulting supports Christian institutions, values-driven companies, nonprofits, and mission-aligned leaders seeking moral clarity and new angles for creativity and problem-solving.

Schedule a meeting to explore how we can work together.

Human-Robot Friendship
Image by Growtika

Why Are Tech Leaders

Calling On Philosophers?

When 60 Minutes asked Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, who should shape AI, he didn’t say more coders. He said we must “include not just engineers, but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers and so on.” 

 

When pressed about AGI’s implications, CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, put it bluntly: “We need new great philosophers… in the next five, ten years to understand the implications of this.” Inside Google DeepMind, the teams writing about how to build “human values” into AI are explicit: “We draw inspiration from philosophy to… identify principles to guide AI behaviour.” 

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See what other tech leaders at Apple, Google, and Microsoft say, and why they’re turning to philosophers for AI’s future, in my short essay below.

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