Speaking - David Siegel
I have been a professional speaker for more than twenty years, giving over 200 speeches from Napa Valley to Sapporo to Tel Aviv. I am a thought leader in innovation, policy, investing, and economics. I have spoken to executives, managers, and audiences up to 2,000 people. I challenge audiences to think differently. I enjoy interacting with audiences, livening up panels, conducting master classes and workshops.
The Metaverse and the Digital Future
In this talk, I show that the Metaverse will be much more than goggles and gaming. While Web3 is more of a buzzword, the Metaverse is the future of the Internet. This talk starts at 30 minutes and can be made longer if required.
Ten Drivers of Change
Ten Drivers of Change for the 21st Century. In this talk from 2018, I take the audience through a neck-snapping tour of the next thirty years that will leave everyone thinking about their true priorities for the future. This is a special 90-minute talk that walks through each of the drivers and shows the impact they will have on our lives: globalization, gene editing, artificial intelligence, future of work, robotics, decentralization, money, life extension, personal data, and volatility. This talk can be customized for your audience.
Blockchain and Decentralization
I have several talks on blockchain, decentralization, tokenomics, and the future of decentralized shared ledgers, both public and private. Here are two talks from several years ago. I update them for each audience and the date of the performance:
Transition to the Machine Economy
I believe we’re in a one-time, 30-year transition that will take place as I describe below. This can be anything from a 40-minute keynote to a two-day workshop on the digital future.
The past: humans communicate and do business with humans. Much of human society is designed around humans transacting with other humans. As I write about in my book, Pull, this worked very well in the era of typewriters and filing cabinets. It has been holding us back ever since.
Next 10 years: The stupid era. Humans lose out to machines, because they continue to cling to their human-to-human paradigm, and machines outperform humans on more and more fronts. We’ve seen examples from the stock market to AI-assisted marketing, and now the rise of AI-assisted scams. AI will win most of these arms races. We should not be trying to compete with computers, yet that’s exactly what we’re doing. Machines will take more and more of the repetitive white-collar work, and then they will take much of the blue-collar work. To escape, the way humans engage with technology and with each other will have to change.
Next 10-30 years: The Smart Era. We are now entering the smart era, where humans and machines interact. Once we stop trying to outdo machines and start working with them, I show that the smart era will eliminate repetitive work, create billions of new jobs, and raise the quality of life for almost everyone on the planet. Once we get it right-way-round, humanity will experience an explosion of productivity, health, longevity, and prosperity - even as we add another 2 billion people and all the necessary jobs to the planet.
30 years and beyond: The Machine Economy. In this talk, based on my popular essay of the same name, I explore how very different the world will be by the middle of this century. By that time, machines will do all repetitive tasks and many many creative tasks. They will entertain us, cook for us, and even put our children to bed. In this world, there are no human drivers on the roads - all drivers are machines that can communicate and coordinate. There will certainly be flying cars. There will be abundant energy, water, food, and natural resources. The human population will have peaked. Many prophesies of doom have not played out in reality. This age will not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly, yet almost everyone will be vastly better off than we are today. What will we do in an age where machines do most of the work? What about the divide between rich and poor? What are the real threats to humanity? I explore these questions and more, with plenty of room for variance and uncertainty.
Three Drivers of Innovation for policymakers
This talk is aimed at government and enterprise policy people. I focus on the “big three” - Innovation, governance, and monetary policy. David shows how these three things will determine 80 percent of the outcomes we see in the 21st century. Here, he shows innovative thinking in governance, policy, and monetary policy. Based on a talk I gave at the European Parliament.
The Future of Education
There are many books and people talking about how to fix education. In this talk, I make the case that education is so broken that it should not be fixed. Instead, we must replace education with something better. I give several examples of how we can reinvent schools and, in many cases get rid of them, to make people ready for an increasingly long life of working and learning. Based on this essay.
A Properly Skeptical Look at Longevity
There are many claims being made now about all kinds of molecules that will extend your life by decades. The only problem is that they have generally only shown to do this in mice, not in humans. Think how hard it is to conduct properly controlled trials to determine whether something makes you live longer - the absolute minimum is six years, and at that point you can maybe say something needs more money and more study. There are many interesting developments and no big breakthroughs. This talk is a summary of Petter Attia’s book, Outlive, which explains that the keys to life extension today are to:
Not smoke
Get your weight under control
Get your blood pressure under control
Mitigate your heart-disease risk factors and take statins
Exercise like your quality of life depends on it — agility, strength, endurance, balance, lung capacity, grip strength, explosiveness, and more.
Reduce stress, anxiety, and mental issues.
That’s it. These are the big things you can do to live a higher quality life for possibly 10-20 years longer than you would otherwise. All the other cool treatments are still out on the horizon.
The road to digital money
This talk can be catered to your audience to help understand money, why cryptocurrencies are not money, what monetary policy is, where we should innovate, why privacy is such a huge concern, and why long-run economic growth matters more than just about anything else. It is relevant for economists, economic students, people working on central-bank digital currencies, and policymakers.
Reboot Finance
We are heavily overregulated, and the regulations were designed in the 1930s. They not only stopped working a long time ago, they never really worked. Reboot Finance is a guide to how the financial system would run if we were redesigning it today for efficiency and effectiveness, rather than legacy and political gain.
Environment and Energy Policy
Climate science 101. I wrote my first book on climate change in 1991. I am a recognized authority on climate and sustainability. I ask hard questions and challenge assumptions. I don’t believe government agencies when they tell me what the world will be like in thirty years, and neither should you. This 40-minute talk does not tell the audience what they want to hear. Instead, I deliver the facts, the data, and the context to understand what’s really driving the earth’s climate. I am happy to answer questions and engage in a polite dialogue on climate issues to help people understand the science and steer toward better global energy policy. Given that decarbonization is almost a $2 trillion/year industry, this is one of my most important talks …
The Deep Optimism Manifesto
This is an important talk based on my essay, The Deep Optimism Manifesto. The general message audiences need to hear is that things are actually far better than they think. The environment is improving. We are feeding the world. Most people are employed. There are a lot of things that sound bad these days, but the media tends to favor bad news. In fact, most things are going in the right direction, despite all the doom-and-gloom messages. Some people don’t want to hear this. That doesn’t make it less true. Try optimism for a change - you might like it.
What is money?
Money is very misunderstood. Is bitcoin money? Is gold money? What supports the dollar? Will we have future forms of money? What is the relationship between macroeconomics and money? How does monetary policy help or hurt the economy? This workshop can be from 2-8 hours, exploring money today and in the future. I introduce concepts of digital money, fiat vs private money, stable coins, nominal GDP level targeting, automated monetary policy, and more.
Introduction to Central Banking and Monetarism
In this workshop, I put monetary policy in perspective and helps people see that most central banks are using outdated models to predict the future of the economy. This talk includes an overview of the Great Depression, the business cycle, the origin of the Fed, understanding the equation of exchange, the role of central banks, nominal vs real GDP as a measure of aggregate demand, the optimal level of inflation, nominal GDP level targeting, a quick overview of the Great Financial Crisis, “never reason from a price change,” the Fed’s dual mandate, global currency issues, and more. This talk is more about macro economics. It relates monetarist theory to Keynesian, new Keynesian, Modern Monetary Theory, and the Austrian school of economics (without diving into those theories). Here is a short version, given to the Vail Symposium in 2020:
David is a fabulous public speaker I have worked with directly on a number of conferences. He always brings a great energy to the room and can tell a complex technical story in a way that wakes everyone up and fully engages them. He strikes the perfect balance between fun, big picture 'blue sky' thinking and practical information.
- Helen Disney, event producer
Short bio
David Siegel is a Silicon-Valley entrepreneur who has started more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, was once a candidate to be the dean of Stanford business school, is a fintech thought leader and is a thought leader in the open Metaverse movement. He is currently building a new coaching platform. His specialties are data, open standards, decentralization, tokenization, stable coins, economics, future of technology, the future of work, climate science, the future of society, and monetary policy.
Longer bio
David Siegel is a Silicon-Valley entrepreneur who has started more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, has given over 200 professional speeches, and was once a candidate to be the dean of Stanford business school. He is a fintech thought leader, an expert on decentralization, and is a thought leader in the open Metaverse movement as well as the environmental movement. He has given a talk on governance to the EU parliament in Brussels - he believes we are overregulated and regulations are strangling innovation around the world. He is currently building a new coaching platform and leading a grass-roots movement against the ESGs. His specialties are data, open standards, decentralization, tokenization, stable coins, economics, future of technology, the future of work, climate science, the future of society, and monetary policy.
