The Lavin Agency

Congratulations to Lavin Exclusive Speaker Vijay Gupta, whose new book, Restrung, is out next Tuesday!

An internationally celebrated violinist and founder of Street Symphony—the nonprofit that has brought music into shelters, jails, and reentry programs across Los Angeles—this MacArthur Genius has spent his career at the intersection of art, justice, and healing. Restrung is his memoir of finding purpose, connection, dignity, and survival through the medicine of music.

Vijay played Carnegie Hall at eight, studied at Juilliard and Yale before most had finished high school, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at nineteen, gave a celebrated TED Talk seen by millions, and launched a nonprofit. But behind the scenes, he was burning out. Restrung follows him through ambition, collapse, and finally to an unexpected reawakening, where he discovered that the music he’d spent his life studying was not mere entertainment, but a lifeline of connection and survival itself.

Award-winning author Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise) writes that Restrung is "a singular, transfixing document of Vijay Gupta's mission to make music in a way that matters to people who live on society’s margins. In place of comfortable clichés about the healing powers of art, Gupta gives us a vision that is at once brutally honest and passionately hopeful. Publishers Weekly calls it simply "a virtuoso performance."

The Lavin Agency is proud to exclusively represent Vijay Gupta for keynotes, conferences, events, and fireside chats. Drawing on his memoir and over a decade of frontline work with Street Symphony, Vijay's talks show audiences how music and art can build trust across difference, restore dignity under pressure, and transform pain into healing.

Learn more about Vijay and his book on our website at the link in bio.

Congratulations, Vijay!

AI is remaking the world around us: from the predictive apps and algorithms we use every day to the literal landscape of data centers and Silicon Valley. How can we take back control of these tools and use them to build the world we want?

Lavin Exclusive Speakers Karen Hao and Carissa Véliz are two of our most influential voices on the effect AI is having on our world and how we can forge a better path forward. This past weekend, they had a rousing discussion at the world-renowned Hay Festival about the promises, perils, and dilemmas shaping AI and the world ahead.

Karen is the instant New York Times bestselling author of Empire of AI, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and one of TIME's 100 most influential people in AI. Karen breaks down the mythology that Silicon Valley is building around AI and illuminates a path towards a future of technological progress that benefits us all.

Carissa is the author of the highly acclaimed new book Prophecy, in which she reveals how predictions, like the algorithms and AI tools we use every day, can become self-fulfilling prophecies to sell a specific future. And those who understand how to use them (or how not to use them) will be the ones who can chart their own course and defy the odds.

Congratulations to Karen and Carissa on a great event!

Learn more about both of these incredible speakers on our website (link in bio).