Keynotes
I made my living selling tickets to hear me talk. Now I do it for rooms like yours.
Corporate keynotes are graded on a curve. I'm not on that curve — my baseline was audiences who paid to be there.
But the reason serious rooms book me isn't stagecraft. It's that I've done the jobs of the people in the audience: startups and the Fortune 100, technology and marketing and operations, the boardroom and the build. So the talk is strange and delightful and it still lands as something you can use Monday morning.
Book it in whatever shape the room needs — keynote, fireside, panel, or a full workshop, anywhere on the map.
The Q&A
Unrehearsed questions used to be my whole product. A dedicated podcast. A sold-out tour. Strangers lined up at microphones to ask the question they couldn’t ask anyone else — and I answered it, cold. No screening, no prep, no notes.
I can do that because I’m modeling the room the whole time: what you’re thinking, what you’re not asking, what will actually move you. A three-act story weaving data, theory, heart, empathy, and application into an answer that sounds like it was written ahead of time — just for you.
So here’s my one request: build in more Q&A than you think you need. Trust me on this one.
This is how it plays out: at Google Xi Days I keynoted on using tabletop-RPG worldbuilding mechanics to build better organizations. Weird topic. The rest of the conference spent the weekend responding to it.
“Mike is way too funny to be as smart as he is and way too honest, touching, insightful and entertaining to be ignored. What I mean is, I resent his multiple talents. Any time he's speaking my ears perk up like a dog hearing a can opener, and yours should, too. Also, feed your dog.”
Pete HolmesStar of HBO's Crashing, host of You Made It Weird
Current questions
I don’t have a keynote I give. I have questions I’m living inside — and the useful version of this page is a conversation about which one is right for your room. Right now:
Where does human judgment have to stay when AI takes the wheel? What do stories actually do to a brain? How does narrative build an organization? How do you turn three people into a real company? What if work increased human capacity instead of extracting it?
I’ve spent a lifetime earning the right to answer these. Bestselling books. Story and script work for household-name film and television. Enough game mastering to do TTRPG design professionally. And the same narrative tools built my startups and ran communications for giant organizations — I don’t teach story as a metaphor. I teach it as infrastructure.
If none of those is right, tell me what the room needs and I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the person for it.
Book me to speak