Posts by Live Talks LA

The life and career of the legendary developer celebrated as the “godfather of computer gaming,” and creator of Civilization.

Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, has been honored with virtually every award in the video game industry. A member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame and founder of Firaxis Games, Meier lives in Hunt Valley, Maryland.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world’s most popular video games, including Sid Meier’s Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier’s Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humor, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond.

Articulating his philosophy that a video game should be “a series of interesting decisions,” Meier also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers, and fascinating insights into the creative process, including his rules of good game design.

“If you ever wished you could stay up all night and hear the most amazing stories from one of the world’s most creative people, Sid’s memoir is for you. This book is full of incredible tech history and deep insights into what it takes to make a world-class game. But most of all, I loved getting inside Sid’s brain and seeing things from his inventive and wise point of view.”– Jane McGonigal, author of the New York Times bestseller Reality is Broken: How Games Can Change the World and Make Us Better

$25 includes a signed book (shipping included and books ship week of September 14)

The legendary comedian, actor, and writer of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda fame shares his key ideas about creativity: that it’s a learnable, improvable skill.

JOHN CLEESE was born in Weston-super-Mare in 1939 and educated at Clifton College and at Cambridge. He achieved his first big success in the West End and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. He went on to co-found the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, writing and performing in the TV series and in films that include Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian. In the mid-1970s, Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the now classic sitcom Fawlty Towers. Later, he wrote and co-starred in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. He has appeared in many other films, from James Bond to Harry Potter, and has guest-starred in numerous TV shows.  

Cleese appeared in conversation with Eric Idle at Live Talks Los Angeles in 2014 to talk about his memoir, “So, Anyway…”.  
The video from that event is our most watched video in our YouTube channel at 2.2 million views.

JUDD APATOW, one of the most sought-after comedic minds in the industry, has directed, produced and written many of the biggest comedy films and hit TV shows of the last two decades. Apatow’s latest feature The King of Staten Island, starring Pete Davidson, Marisa Tomei and Bill Burr, is inspired by events from Davidson’s own life. Previous director credits include The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, This is 40, and Trainwreck. He produced the Academy Award®-nominated films The Big Sick, Bridesmaids as well as Superbad and Anchorman. In television he was the executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, Girls, Crashing and Love.

“Many people have written about creativity, but although they were very, very clever, they weren’t actually creative. I like to think I’m writing about it from the inside.”—John Cleese

You might think that creativity is some mysterious, rare gift—one that only a few possess. But you’d be wrong. As John Cleese shows in this short, practical, and often amusing guide, it’s a skill that anyone can acquire. 
 
Drawing on his lifelong experience as a writer, Cleese shares his insights into the nature of the creative process and offers advice on how to get your own inventive juices flowing. What do you need to do to get yourself in the right frame of mind? When do you know that you’ve come up with an idea that might be worth pursuing? What should you do if you think you’ve hit a brick wall?
 
We can all be more creative. John Cleese shows us how.

$37 includes a book with signed book plate (shipping included)*
*Books ship week of September 7.

An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America 
 
JON MEACHAM is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. A contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor of Time magazine, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Hope of Glory, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston. Meacham, who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, lives in Nashville.

John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. 
 
Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.

Frank Buckley is an anchor of KTLA Morning News. Frank joined KTLA in June 2005 from CNN where he had been a national correspondent. Frank is also host of the “Frank Buckley Interviews” podcast.

Frank’s reporting experiences have taken him around the world and have included assignments covering the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, politics for CNN, frequent reporting from the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency, natural disasters in Japan, the Los Angeles riots, the Hong Kong handover, the OJ Simpson trial and countless other stories in Southern California and across the U.S.

Prior to KTLA and CNN, Frank reported for Los Angeles station KCAL-TV, WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, N.C., and at KESQ-TV in Palm Springs. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News.

$35 includes a book with signed book plate (shipping included)*
*Books ship week of September 1.

BRIAN STELTER is the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide and anchor of Reliable Sources, which examines the world’s top media stories every Sunday. Prior to joining CNN in 2013, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times. His first book, the New York Times bestseller Top of the Morning, inspired the Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show. Stelter is a consulting producer on the series. He is also the executive producer of the HBO documentary After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. 

JUDD APATOW, one of the most sought-after comedic minds in the industry, has directed, produced and written many of the biggest comedy films and hit TV shows of the last two decades. Apatow’s latest feature The King of Staten Island, starring Pete Davidson, Marisa Tomei and Bill Burr, is inspired by events from Davidson’s own life. Previous director credits include The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, This is 40, and Trainwreck. He produced the Academy Award®-nominated films The Big Sick, Bridesmaids as well as Superbad and Anchorman. In television he was the executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, Girls, Crashing and Love.

The urgent and untold story of the collusion between Fox News and Donald Trump from the New York Times bestselling author of Top of the Morning.

While other leaders were marshaling resources to combat the greatest pandemic in modern history, President Donald Trump was watching TV. Trump watches over six hours of Fox News a day, a habit his staff refers to as “executive time.” In January 2020, when Fox News began to downplay COVID-19, the President was quick to agree. In March, as the deadly virus spiraled out of control, Sean Hannity mocked “coronavirus hysteria” as a “new hoax” from the left. Millions of Americans took Hannity and Trump’s words as truth—until some of them started to get sick.

In Hoax, CNN anchor and chief media correspondent Brian Stelter tells the twisted story of the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News. From the moment Trump glided down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy in the 2016 presidential election to his acquittal on two articles of impeachment in early 2020, Fox hosts spread his lies and smeared his enemies. Over the course of two years, Stelter spoke with over 250 current and former Fox insiders in an effort to understand the inner workings of Rupert Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar media empire. Some of the confessions are alarming. “We don’t really believe all this stuff,” a producer says. “We just tell other people to believe it.”

At the center of the story lies Sean Hannity, a college dropout who, following the death of Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes, reigns supreme at the network that pays him $30 million a year. Stelter describes the raging tensions inside Fox between the Trump loyalists and the few remaining journalists. He reveals why former chief news anchor Shep Smith resigned in disgust in 2019; why a former anchor said “if I stay here I’ll get cancer;” and how Trump has exploited the leadership vacuum at the top to effectively seize control of the network.

Including never before reported details, Hoax exposes the media personalities who, though morally bankrupt, profit outrageously by promoting the President’s propaganda and radicalizing the American right. It is a book for anyone who reads the news and wonders: How did this happen?