Every claim checks out, so nothing you put in front of your students can embarrass you later.
Chad Kempel set four Guinness World Records pushing his quintuplets in a stroller and holds an MA in Experimental Psychology. Every talk is built on something that actually happened to him, and every one hands students plain words for what they’ve already been feeling.
Local Introductory Rate: $1,000 per assembly · See what’s included ↓Each talk does a different job. The principal usually books the first one, the counseling team asks for the second, and whoever’s working on school culture wants the third. Any one of them stands on its own.
For five years he taught college students at San Jose State University. For five of those years he also volunteered inside San Quentin State Prison, teaching math. What struck him in both rooms was the same thing: the people across from him weren’t nearly as different as the world wanted to believe. Different paths, different circumstances, and both groups still showing up, still reaching for something more. The window doesn’t close. It just costs more the longer it stays shut.
Chad's three talks were built for this moment.
“He makes the material simple so we can understand it and he involves the class in activities or games so we are fully present in class.”
A phrase most students roll their eyes at, rebuilt as a decision followed by evidence. It opens in an eighth-grade locker room, not at a finish line, and the race times are in public databases, so nobody gets to write it off as an athlete thing.
Four Guinness World Records, an MA in Experimental Psychology, five years teaching college. Also a guy who took intro stats twice to scrape out a C and nearly didn’t graduate high school. Students remember that part. They walk out able to name four ideas: the freeze response, locus of control, post-traumatic growth, and pain with a purpose, each one tied to something that happened to him.
It starts with a slap in a locker room and runs through wrestling, a grade turnaround, an Ironman entered in his father’s name, five babies born at 27 weeks, three tries at a world record, and a handmade sign that ended up in a museum in Copenhagen. Students leave with a way to make a decision and one thing to do about it that night.
The mental health assembly that doesn’t need “mental health” on the poster. Students get real names for what’s going on inside them, from a guy with an MA in Experimental Psychology who’s carried plenty himself.
Students learn four terms they’ll use the same week: cognitive load, the freeze response, displacement, and weight that comes out sideways. Chad teaches them the way he taught psychology for five years, plainly, because you can’t put something down until you know what to call it.
It opens at a university podium, the moment his phone rang and he found out he was losing his twin sons. Then a 100-mile run past every landmark of his life. Then a friend who struggled with addiction and died by suicide at 29, and another murdered at 22, in a car Chad had been invited to ride in that night. Every story comes with a tool students can use that same night. Chad follows safe-messaging guidelines for talking about suicide and meets with your counseling team before he walks into the gym.
No records, no stroller, no finish line. This one’s about the kid standing by himself in the hallway, because Chad was that kid. It ends with the simplest ask a school will ever hear: sit down next to someone who looks like they’re alone.
Chad had no fallback plan at lunch. Years later he counseled children with disabilities, taught math inside San Quentin, and coached Special Olympics athletes, and this talk comes out of what those rooms had in common. The research underneath it (pluralistic ignorance, self-determination theory, social baseline theory) gets explained in plain English.
It ends with one request: tomorrow, sit down next to someone who looks like they’re alone. It costs the school nothing, nobody needs permission, and some of them will actually do it the next day.
"I'm trying to show them something extraordinary. I did this and they can too. They can do whatever they want to do."
Every booking includes two pages built for the people who are still there on Monday. Nothing to print, nothing to install. Your teachers and your students open them on whatever they already have.
Discussion questions and journal prompts for the talk your school heard, a two-week plan, a projector mode for the classroom screen, and what to do if a student opens up. Ready before first period.
See what your teachers getThe tools from the talk, three things to do this week, and the stories behind it. It’s theirs, not homework, and it’s there whenever they come back to it.
See what your students getReady to book?
Check Your DateEvery kid in that gym is carrying something. Chad isn’t going to tell them to put it down. He’s going to help them figure out what it is, and show them it doesn’t get to decide how their story ends.
Real psychology, taught plainly. Terms they’ll actually use at home, in the locker room, and in the counselor’s office.
Race times, records, media features. It’s all public, and they’re welcome to look it up before the bell rings.
Bad grades, empty hallways, two public misses at a world record, then a decision. Those records aren’t trophies. They’re receipts.
A sentence to write, a person to sit with, a decision to make. Small enough to actually happen, and a lot of the time it starts with sitting down next to somebody.
No travel fee for schools within a few hours of Boise.
Also booking graduations, student leadership conferences and educator and conference keynotes.
Booking a California school? See the California Introductory Rate.
Booking a school in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada or anywhere else in the West? See the Western States Introductory Rate.
Book ChadWhat principals usually ask before they book. If yours isn’t here, send it over and you’ll hear back within 48 hours.
Every record, credential, and media feature on this site is publicly verifiable.
Discovery calls available. Replies within 48 hours.
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