Michael Landsberg

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Darkness and Hope: My Story and What It Taught Me

  Michael Landsberg was one of Canada’s most recognizable broadcasters — sharp, funny, seemingly untouchable. What almost no one knew was that he was fighting depression severe enough to bring him, one night in a Montreal hotel room, to the edge of wanting to die. Not to escape his life — to escape the pain of living it. He has the date tattooed on his arm so he never forgets what he came back from.

  In this keynote, Landsberg walks audiences through that night, the 11 seconds on live television that changed everything, and what he’s learned since about depression, silence, and survival. It’s raw, unflinching, and — somehow — genuinely funny, because Landsberg believes a room that’s laughing is a room that’s actually listening.

  Audiences don’t leave informed. They leave understood, many of them for the first time.

• Vulnerability Is Not Weakness: Mental Health and Leadership

  Most speakers ask leaders to be vulnerable. Michael Landsberg shows them how.

  Drawing on his own decade of hiding a mental illness in plain sight, he makes the case that the real gap between a boss and a leader is vulnerability itself — and that showing it first is what gives everyone else in the room permission to stop pretending they’re fine.

  No slides of soft language, no “lean into your authentic self.” Landsberg replaces the corporate script with plain, direct honesty about what struggling actually looks and sounds like, and why silence is the most expensive habit a workplace can have.

  Leaders leave with a new definition of strength, and a concrete starting point for building a team where people can say the truth out loud before it costs them.

• Silence Is the Real Killer

  Michael Landsberg’s core belief, hard-won: silence is mental illness’s greatest ally.

  In this talk, Landsberg unpacks why so many people — especially those under the most pressure to appear fine — hide their struggles until it’s nearly too late, and why “I had no idea” is one of the most common things said after a tragedy.

  Using his own story alongside the stories of people who’ve written to him over the years, Landsberg reframes disclosure not as weakness or burden, but as one of the greatest compliments one person can give another.

  Practical, moving, and occasionally very funny, this talk gives audiences language for the conversations they’ve been avoiding — with themselves and with the people they love — and makes the case that talking isn’t just healing. It’s survival.

• Treat Mental Health Like Dental Health

  Nobody hides a toothbrush in their desk. Nobody’s ashamed to see a dentist. So why is mental illness treated so differently?

  In this talk, Michael Landsberg dismantles stigma not as an abstract concept but as a daily, personal choice everyone makes — often without realizing it. Using sharp, memorable comparisons between physical and mental health, he shows audiences exactly where their own thinking still carries a “but” in it, and why that “but” can be the difference between someone getting help and someone suffering silently.

  Funny, direct, and built for organizations serious about culture change, this talk leaves audiences with a simple, repeatable framework for recognizing stigma in themselves — the necessary first step before anyone can dismantle it in a workplace, a family, or a friendship.

• Understood: Why Connection Beats Every Statistic

  Statistics inform us. Stories transform us.

  In this talk, Michael Landsberg argues that the mental health movement has over-relied on statistics — and under-relied on the one thing that actually changes people: the stories that make people feel understood.

  He shares the moment his own decade-long silence broke, and the flood of strangers who told him, “Because you said it, I told someone” — proof that one honest story can do what a thousand awareness campaigns can’t.

  Landsberg makes the case that loneliness isn’t about how many people surround you, but how many actually understand you, and shows audiences — regardless of industry or background — how to become that one person for someone else. This is a talk about connection as medicine, delivered by someone who’s lived on both sides of that equation.