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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Chuck Klosterman

The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.

Renowned Cultural Critic | Author of Ten Books, Including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

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Write the Book You’ve Always Wanted to Read

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What If All Our ‘Facts’ Proved to Be False?

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But What If We’re Wrong About … Everything?

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Thinking About the Present As If it Were the Past

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What If All Our âFactsâ Proved to Be False?

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But What If We’re Wrong About Everything?

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

Pop culture, in all its distracting glitz, isn’t just entertainment. It is culture—American culture. And our most insightful guide is Chuck Klosterman. In his bestselling, culture-defining books, he’s pinned down modern America like no one else. And in fun, funny talks, he not only cuts to the bone of our media-saturated moment, but makes it the site of our shared, unlikely commonality.

Writing about pop culture doesn’t get any better than this, or funnier.Stephen King on Fargo, Rock City

One of the most exciting cultural critics of our time, Chuck Klosterman is not a detached academic who deconstructs culture at arm’s-length with a deadening sterility. He’s a regular guy whose intellectual curiosity is insatiable, infectious, and surprisingly insightful—showing why “pop” is a conversation that anyone can join in on, and capturing what it feels like to navigate our weird, wired, pop-obsessed moment right now.

He is the best-selling author of eight nonfiction books (most notably Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and I Wear the Black Hat) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man). Klosterman’s most recent work, Raised in Captivity, is a collection of surreal shot stories “so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection.” The Washington Post calls it an “engagingly sardonic collection that will leave you, like one of Klosterman’s own bewildered characters, ‘relaxed and confused.’” Another recent collection, Chuck Klosterman X, compiles and contextualizes the best of his essays from the past decade, with pieces written on everything from Taylor Swift, Jonathan Franzen, and Charlie Brown, to Mountain Dew and steroids. His previous book—debuting in its first week on The New York Times bestsellers list—is But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. It’s both an earnest attempt to speculate on what, and how, our culture might transform over time, and a rational inoculation against the dangers of assumption. It dispels the “casual certitude” of our era by imagining what culture might look like 100, 300, or even 1,000 years from now.

One of the brightest pieces of pop analysis to appear this century.The Onion on Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Klosterman has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, SPIN, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The AV Club, and ESPN. He served as The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, where he dispensed uncommon wisdom on moral conundrums, and appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits. He also created the web site Grantland with Bill Simmons.

Lavin Exclusive Speakers

Angela Duckworth

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Nikole Hannah-Jones

There isn’t a beat you can cover in America—education, housing—where race is not a factor.

Greg Hoffman

Great brands don’t simply reach customers: they create real emotional bonds with them.

George M. Johnson

Stories of queer identity and Black joy have the power to educate us on diversity, inspire social justice activism, and build community.

Nicholas Thompson

Technology and science continue to make the world a better place—we can’t lose sight of that core truth.

Speech Topics

Visualizing the Far Future (Once “Now” Becomes “Then”)But What If?

In this keynote, based on his new book But What If We’re Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who’ll perceive it as the distant past. Throughout, he asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity, or time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, 500 years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams, or the content of TV? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing: is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge?

Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, this talk builds on input from a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a keynote about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”

Life Through the Prism of Pop Culture

In his talks, Chuck Klosterman discusses how pop culture shapes a person’s identity. Why do so many of us define ourselves by the media we consume—the music we love, the movies we obsessively reference, the television we can’t stop watching? With inspired leaps of logic and a sense for relatable minutiae, Klosterman shows us how pop culture becomes inextricably linked with our memories, how it helps us understand the world, and what this says about us, as individuals and as a society. Bright with provocation, hilarious non-sequiturs and good-natured debate, an evening with Klosterman will help you see our accelerating world, and the little connections that make it fascinating, in a newly appreciative light.