The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau
A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
It’s time to rethink the internet. The blockchain offers us great potential to democratize our digital spaces and bring them back under our control.
“Web3” is about to change everything. Combining blockchain technology with artificial intelligence and virtual reality, this next iteration of the internet will overturn the business models of “Web2” titans like Google and Facebook. It will also digitally transform analog industries from real estate to fine art and fundamentally alter the relationships of brand to customer, artist to fan and policymaker to constituent. Web3 is rich with potential to solve the planet’s problems. But to navigate the unprecedented economic and social disruption that comes with it, we need a guide. There is no better one than Michael Casey.
“Michael is an outstanding guide to the new and bewildering world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Armed with a deep understanding of the history and evolution of blockchain, he offers unique insight into the promises and risks of this rapidly evolving space.”
— Saadia Madsbjerg, Managing Director at The Rockefeller Foundation
Michael is the Chief Content Officer of CoinDesk, an award-winning media outlet, and previously spent two decades at The Wall Street Journal. He’ll help you look beyond distracting “crypto” headlines to discover that blockchain innovators are progressively building “digital citizenship” – a hopeful vision of transparency, innovation, and integrity. In doing so, he can help businesses thrive in the “coming golden age of creativity and collaborative problem-solving.”
A leading thinker on digital media, financial innovation, and global economics, Michael urges consumer-facing businesses to follow the lead of Web3 innovators. Starbucks and Nike, for example, are bypassing today’s data-controlling middlemen to revitalize their connections with customers. He shows how diverse members of the financial and business establishment—from Warner Bros to Franklin Templeton—are tokenizing assets such as music royalties, art, and corporate loans to unlock liquidity on Wall Street and bring the ownership economy to Main Street.
At the helm of CoinDesk media team, and as the host of the highly influential annual Consensus conference, Casey has developed a clear vision of how businesses can embrace Web3’s best elements and avoid its worst. Under his leadership, CoinDesk has grown into a leading tech brand. In November 2022, the newsroom broke the bombshell story that led to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire, earning the prestigious George Polk award for two of its reporters. Michael is also a Senior Advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He founded data analytics startup Streambed and co-launched the Crypto Impact Sustainability Accelerator, a research body housed at the World Economic Forum.
A globetrotter who has lived and worked on five continents, Michael has published five acclaimed books. These include, with Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, now in 15 languages, and its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He spent more than two decades as a journalist, including 18 years with The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior columnist covering global finance and economics. In addition to hundreds of bylines at WSJ Casey has written for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Fortune, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, and many other publications. At CoinDesk he writes the widely read “Money Reimagined” newsletter and, with Sheila Warren, the CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, he co-hosts a weekly podcast of the same name.
CEO & Co-Founder of XLabs and Ribo One of Forbes's 30 Women in AI to Watch Artificial Intelligence Pioneer
CEO of Trend Hunter New York Times bestselling author of Create the Future
Bestselling author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Activist and scholar
CEO of The Atlantic Former editor-in-chief of WIRED
Founder and CEO of Wealthsimple
CEO of Clovyr Former JP Morgan Blockchain Lead
Grit, more than talent, IQ, looks, or wealth, is a powerful indicator of success.
There isn’t a beat you can cover in America—education, housing—where race is not a factor.
Great brands don’t simply reach customers: they create real emotional bonds with them.
Stories of queer identity and Black joy have the power to educate us on diversity, inspire social justice activism, and build community.
Technology and science continue to make the world a better place—we can’t lose sight of that core truth.
The world’s largest banks are larger than ever. In a digital era, credit fraud is ever present. Our quaint notions of privacy are ever-more perilous. We can’t look to so-called ‘legacy’ systems for help: they’re ill equipped to keep the economy stable or our lives simple. So we look to the blockchain, argues Michael Casey: a public, common good; a means to transfigure major parts of the economy with an operating system that is, in a word, revolutionary; and a decentralized trust architecture to manage the decentralized economy we’re building. In this keynote, based on his latest book The Truth Machine (the sequel to The Age of Cryptocurrency), Casey unveils the disruptive potential of blockchain for a wide range of industries (shipping, legal, tech, finance, security, and beyond). Essentially, blockchain offers more trust, and more control: to personal actors worried about data, identity, or assets; to those excluded by the unfair distributions of globalism; and to society itself, long in need of a restoration of faith in its capacity to order, manage, and plan. It’s not without its challenges, of course—and Casey is sure to discuss the threats to employment, public interest, and social cohesion that are coming. But with rich, fascinating examples, he champions the need for this utterly transparent, digital, radical model to pass over and replace broken and unreliable institutions and their self-serving middlemen. This is about empowerment, Casey says: a way to move humanity forward into a world of decentralized, more reliable technology.
Bitcoin became a buzzword overnight. It pops up in headlines and fuels endless media debate. Yet it seems few people truly understand what it is. In this economics keynote, blockchain speaker Michael Casey delivers the definitive answer to the question: Why should anyone care about bitcoin? The “blockchain” technology behind cryptocurrencies holds the promise of a financial system without middlemen—a change that’s 500 years in the making. It puts that system in the control of the people who use it, safeguarding them from a 2008-type crash. Much more than a new digital form of currency, this technology could integrate billions of hitherto excluded people into the global economy, restore individuals’ control over their private data and identities, and change the way organizations and business relationships are governed.When coupled with mobile money apps, Big Data-driven banking services, decentralized e-marketplaces, and countless fintech innovations aimed at breaking big banks’ dominance, the blockchain’s core concept of a distributed ledger of information could reinvent the economy as we know it. The potential savings from this disruptive technology are so big that the World Economic Forum predicts that as much as 10 percent of world GDP will be transacted over it by 2025. Casey is an economics speaker with lucidity and verve: he makes this unfamiliar but important topic accessible, and teaches us what we need to know to be ready for this big shift.
Today, we have far less control over the flow, distribution, or quantity of information than ever before. And social media—the most transformative change to communications since the Gutenberg bible—requires a radically new framework to fully understand it. Enter Michael Casey. In his book The Social Organism, he argues that social media functions much like a living organism. In this keynote, Casey celebrates the organic spread of information, and offers eye-opening insights into how you can embrace, rather than resist, the zeitgeist. It means moving to an open, decentralized structure, allowing your brand to be adapted and replicated by the public. It means creating worlds other people actually want to build upon. And it means creating the right environment and tools for your customers to become your best ambassadors—getting into people’s heads (and hearts) like never before. With reference to massive brands, memes, online humor, and the new celebrities of the YouTube era, Casey offers a invigorating new way of making sense of the digital world for business leaders, marketers, and everyone else online.