Thursday, April 10, 2014

8:00pm (reception, 6:30-7:30pm)

Michael Lewis
in conversation with Malcolm Gladwell

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

The Alex Theatre
216 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA 91203

SALES ENDED ON THIS SITE, VISIT ALEX BOX OFFICE SITE.
$22 General Admission
$45 Reserved Seats* + Lewis’s book, Flash Boys
$115 Premium Seats* + Reception, (6:30-7:30pm) + Lewis’ and Gladwell’s SOLD OUT

A book signing follows the event.

* At check in, you will get a ticket that gives you access to a reserved block of seats
** At check in, you will get a ticket that gives you access to the premium reserved block of seats

All tickets include Alex Theatre restoration facility fee of $2.00

Michael Lewis on 6o Minutes March 30.
Michael Lewis also in The Financial TimesNew York Magazineon MarketWatch

Michael Lewis is the author of the best-sellers The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday MachineThe Blind Side: Evolution of a Game; Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game; Liar’s Poker; Boomerang; The New New Thing and Panic, among others.

Michael Lewis’ upcoming book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt offers a ringside seat to the ways of Wall Street.  His past works on the financial industry are game-changing examinations of the most important financial issues of our time.  Come hear him — in conversation with Malcolm Gladwell — reveal what he’s been investigating.  We’re thrilled to welcome Gladwell back to Live Talks Los Angeles for his third visit.

Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.

After graduating from Princeton University and the London School of Economics, Lewis worked on the bond desk at Salomon Brothers, an experience he recounted in Liar’s Poker, his first book. He left the financial world to become a journalist, writing on politics, finance and more for The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Slate and other publications. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is also the author of Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 1996. He is the bestselling author of The Tipping PointBlinkOutliers, and What the Dog Saw and most recently, David and Goliath. In 2005, he was named one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People.  From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

We welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to Live Talks Los Angeles. We recently hosted him discussing David and Goliath with Tim Long (see the video) and also with Virginia Postrel at our Live Talks Business Forum (see the video).  He also interviewed David Goldhill at Live Talks Los Angeles in February 2013 on fixing healthcare in America. Here’s the video.