RAMAN FREY
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About Raman Frey


I speak, write, and bring communities
together for meaningful conversations
"How might we cooperate at scale, coordinate our efforts and shape our own behaviors to create a more just and thriving world?

What if we built the incentives that in turn shape us, the nudges which influence our everyday habits and choices? 

Imagine new regenerative economies that naturally produce equilibrium, a flourishing biosphere resulting from our global civilization.

Imagine reinventing ideas of ownership, access, liberty and self-determination.

​What do we want to incentivize?"
Since first arriving in the Bay Area in 2000, Raman has built companies and communities, bringing people together around meaningful conversations about art, technology, religion, politics and philosophy.

He’s founded or co-founded businesses such as Frey Norris Gallery, The Bureau, GP Dinners and Camp Earnest.  Raman has served on the boards of organizations like Epicenter Arts and YBCA. As an event producer, public speaker, moderator and interviewer, he enjoys unscripted interviews both online and at a variety of favorite venues. His events celebrate the ideal of good faith in civil discourse, amongst people with contrasting points of view.


In various articles, essays and interviews, Raman describes a framework he calls Incentive System Design (ISD).  ISD is thinking differently and comprehensively about how we shape our own and one another's behaviors and designing systems that guide those behaviors in desired directions at scale.  It's a way for us to radically expand our use of applied behavioral science.

​Most importantly, ISD experiments seek to shape our choices as participants in an economy.  These experiments propagate greater human equality, grow dignity, and restrain production and consumption, bolstering regeneration and equilibrium in natural systems.  ISD is at the heart of everything Raman aspires to build and any legacies he might hope to leave in our world.
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Raman has also served in advisory capacities for a number of stealth and launched startups, including New Age Meats, Better Humans and AH Global. He has served as an advisor at Zymmo, Eqogo, Talgo, and Lohika, where he's hosted many episodes of their online event series Re:Think.

In 2012 he founded Good People Dinners, a Bay Area community that fosters substantive conversations, usually over food and drink. These dinners, corporate salons, overnights and retreats bring together professional chefs and speakers on a wide range of topics. GP Dinners
has produced over 500 events and counting.  Raman's designed GP dinners, overnights, retreats and corporate salon series for companies like Capgemini, Turing, Mozilla, Lohika, Frog Design, Altran and Synapse.

In 2020, with his wife Karin Johnson, Raman co-founded Camp Earnest.  

Camp Earnest is a former summer camp in the mountains of northern California, 46 miles from Yosemite National Park.  Earnest's 21 acres include a rental house, several cabins, two year round yurts on platforms, two three season bell tents, a dining lodge, cedar bathhouse with toilets, showers, a Finnish sauna, and a large cedar hot tub.  An Acoustic Amphitheater and a meditation and movement hall have both been refurbished and serve as venues for strategy sessions, fireside chats and relaxation. Visitors enjoy our artist designed fire circles, our year round spring fed creek, waterfalls, artist murals and sculptures and a rock labyrinth.  Camp Earnest provides a relaxing place to stay and, during our events, chef prepared farm to table feasts. At camp, we produce and host facilitated programs and workshops that ground us in our shared humanity and hopes for an inspiring future.


Raman has written op-eds at a variety of publications, authored books on art and has posted interviews and written extensively on Medium.

An avid traveler, mountaineer, scuba diver, and amateur chef, Raman hosts dinners for friends at his home as often as he can. 
"Raman is an impressively dynamic thinker and conversationalist. He's next-level intelligent, articulate, and focused. And equally as important, he’s authentic, funny, and kind."
Drew Mohoric, Founder and CEO of www.betterhumans.xyz ​
“Raman has one of the most versatile and curious minds I’ve ever encountered and is a gravitational center for some of the most brilliant and thoughtful people I’ve met in the Bay Area. His writing is dense, substantive and sometimes full of revelations, glimpses beyond the horizon of what’s possible.”
— Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD is Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities, UC Berkeley
“Leave your business cards and your cell phones behind, and talk with good people about things that matter. It takes an extraordinary person to make this more than just a good idea, but something that actually works.”
— Mark Lemley, Professor at Stanford Law, Co-Founder at Lex Machina

Get in Touch

  1. To hire Raman as a speaker or facilitator of your meaningful discussions, please fill out this form and someone will respond within 48 hours. 
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  2. To join us for upcoming dinners, please click here to be taken to Good People Dinners.
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