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
This keynote speech outlines the transition from here to the full machine economy over the next 20 years. This will see a fundamental shift in the economy from pushing products and services to customers pulling them. In this economy, people will ask for results and AI and robots will deliver the results. Brands will matter much less than they do now. Some brands will claim victory while most brands will become commodities.
Today, people actively search for products and services, but in the world of Pull, search is over. Marketing messages have no effect. Buyer intent is made transparent from machine to machine, rather than by guessing via keyword searches and clicks. Today, 98 percent of all marketing messages are wasted, fishing for the few who respond and then go through funnels and various psychological tricks to get attention and steer toward a purchase. In the machine economy, that goes away. People say what they want and their AI agents and robots bring it to them. AI will not fall for Chaldini mind tricks. AI will do apples-to-apples cost/benefit comparison by comparing offers directly.
In this talk, I explain how we will go from today's e-commerce platforms to an AI native "World of offers" that will bypass all existing channels and work headless, lights out, 24/7, on behalf of buyers. What can sellers do in this world? What is the marketer's role? How will this play out?
My goal is to create a mental framework for understanding how different this world will be and how it has already started. Smart marketers will get ahead by participating in this new world and even driving straight into it, helping create it and leaving the old world of push-marketing behind.
This talk is based on my book, Pull: https://www.amazon.com/Pull-Portfolio-David-Siegel-2010-04-29/dp/B019TLS5UC
It is an update based on an essay I wrote in 2020: https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net/machine-economy
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.
