← Mike McHargue

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, or a full workshop, anywhere on the map. One request: build in more Q&A than you think you need. Unrehearsed questions used to be the whole product — a dedicated podcast, a sold-out tour.

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 McHargue on stage at Google, gesturing toward a large screen that reads "What if work increased human capacity instead of extracting it?" while a seated audience watches.
Google Xi Days“What if work increased human capacity instead of extracting 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

I don’t have a keynote I give. I have obsessions, and the useful version of this is a conversation about which one is right for your room. Lately:

  • AI, and where human judgment has to stay put.
  • Narrative systems as tools for building organizations.
  • A deep dive into the neurological, cognitive, and emotional impacts that stories have on humans and their brains.
  • The specific, unglamorous mechanics of turning three people into a real company.
  • What it would take for work to increase human capacity instead of extracting it.

The story topics are the ones I’ve spent a lifetime earning. 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