origin

The first role I ever had was the Changeling Child in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was six. I didn't read the script. I learned the part by listening to rehearsals until it was just in me. That's how it worked for a while: I could hold a Shakespeare role at six years old, but I couldn't get through a chapter book.

Reading and writing were genuinely hard for a long time. It took until I was an adult to get the full picture: dyslexia, ADHD, the whole thing. By then I'd already figured out the workarounds. Performance was native. So was photography. Voice work, hosting, interviewing. Mediums where you could think out loud, hold an audience, build something in real time without having to file it first through the page.

Twenty years of that shapes how you see things. When I started working with AI tools seriously, what struck me wasn't the hype. It was how many of the tools leveled a playing field I'd been navigating sideways for years. Drafting, structuring, transcription, synthesis. Things that take neurodiverse practitioners two or three times the energy to do on their own. I'm not an evangelist. I was on the SAG and WGA picket lines and using ChatGPT the same week. The discomfort is real. But so is what the tools actually do for people who think differently.

Most of the speaking topics (AI and neurodiversity, the picket line and the prompt, building people-first AI products) start at the same place. A kid who could memorize Shakespeare before he could finish a chapter book.