Michael Moran is currently finishing a year-long documentary project for Carnegie that looks at the dangers that the cyber hacking and information warfare of the 2016 relationship have reawakened in the US-Russian relationship. The basic question is this: After the ultimate reset in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapse and Russia rejoined the capitalist world, how did we get here again?

Over the past year, Michael has interviewed everyone fro Madeleine Albright to Mikhail Gorbachev to Kissinger to Daniel Yergin. The documentary: Diffusion: The Quest for Stability in US Russian Relations, will launch May 1. As executive producer of the project, Michael is one of its leading editorial voices and can thoroughly dissect the topics:

• Strike Back or Parley? How We Should Deal with Foreign Cyber Warfare

• Putin’s Next Act

• The Race No-one Wants: The Return of Nuclear Weapons

As a senior advisor to Microshare.io, a leading data governance and IoT player, Michael has published a white paper on GDPR, the upcoming data privacy regulation that goes into effect in the EU in May. This is just one of many hot topics in the news since Facebook and Google recently ran afoul of their shareholders recently. Since the advent of the internet, we have made a deal with the devil: We get free content, and in exchange we show some of our data. But we didn’t know just how far the big digital companies would go. Specific topics include:

• You Are What You Tweet (Or All Humans Are 90 Percent Data)

• Losing Facebook: How the World’s Greatest Social Media Network Let Data Defeat It

• C Suite Dilemma: IoT Beckons with Vast New Revenue Streams - But Corporate Counsels Are Terrified

We Americans are living in the midst of Generation Innovation but we act like terminal patients. With all the negative news and the media focus on Washington’s eternal food fight, the United States has an amazing ability to innovate, adapt, attract talent and self-correct. The US budget deficit shrinks in defiance of doomsayers, increasing tax revenues and leaving the US economy a lone ray of light on the global scene right now. The economic growth of the past few years may not feel fast enough to you, but as Americans continue to produce new, disruptive innovations - smart phones, drones, 3D printing, REITS, fracking – they have invalidated negative predictions about energy, manufacturing and growth while adding billions to our GDP. But the real growth story is about people: Demographic projections suggest the US is the only major advanced economy whose population will grow at over 25 percent over the next quarter century, providing yet another homegrown solution to the scaremongers favorite bogeyman: the collapse of Social Security. This talk provides a note of optimism among the noise.