Posts by Live Talks LA
Ali Wentworth with Jackie Collins
Thursday, June 11, 2015
8:00pm
Ali Wentworth
in conversation with Jackie Collins
Happily Ali After:
And More Fairly True Tales
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Seats
$43 Includes Wentworth’s book + Seats in reserved section
*Jackie Collins’ new novel, The Santangelos, will be available for sale at the event.
Ali Wentworth made a name for herself on the comedy show In Living Color, and has appeared on such television shows as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; Seinfeld (playing Schmoopie in the “Soup Nazi” episode); Head Case (which she created, wrote, and executive produced); and The Oprah Winfrey Show, for which she was a correspondent. Her film credits include Jerry Maguire, The Real Blonde, Office Space, and It’s Complicated. Her first book is the New York Times bestseller Ali in Wonderland. A native of Washington, D.C., Wentworth lives in New York City with her husband, George Stephanopoulos, and their two girls. Visit her website.
The actress and comedian picks up where she left off in Ali in Wonderland, dissecting modern life—and this time, on a mission of self-improvement—in a series of laugh-out-loud comic vignettes.
Moved by a particularly inspirational tweet one day, she resolves to live by the pithy maxims she discovers in her feeds. What begins as a sort of self-help project quickly turns into something far grander—and increasingly funnier—as the tweets she once viewed with irony become filled with increasing metaphysical importance. And thus begins her “Unhappiness Project.”
It’s not long before Ali expands her self-improvement quest to include parenting, relationship, fitness (or lack thereof), and dieting advice. The results are painfully (at times literally) clear: when it comes to self-help, sometimes you should leave it to the professionals.
Jackie Collins is the author of thirty New York Times bestselling novels. More than 500 million of her books have sold in more than forty countries. From Hollywood Wives to Lady Boss, from Chances to Poor Little Bitch Girl, Jackie Collins has chronicled the lives of the rich and famous with “devastating accuracy” (Los Angeles Times). Visit her website.
Her next novel, The Santangelos, will be released on June 16, 2015.
A vicious hit. A vengeful enemy. A drug addled Colombian club owner. A sex crazed Italian family. And the ever powerful Lucky Santangelo has to deal with them all, while Max—her teenage daughter is becoming The “It” girl in Europe’s modeling world. And her Kennedyesque son, Bobby, is being set up for a murder he didn’t commit. But Lucky can deal. Always strong and unpredictable with her husband, Lennie, by her side she lives up to the family motto—Never fuck with a Santangelo.
Lucky rules. The Santangelos always come out on top. An epic family saga filled with love, lust, revenge and passion.
Matthieu Ricard with Pico Iyer
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
8:00pm (Reception 6:30-7:30pm)
Matthieu Ricard
in conversation with Pico Iyer
Altruism:
The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself
and the World
Moss Theatre
New Roads School
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT. Please note that we are also hosting Matthieu Ricard in our morning Live Talks Business Forum on June 10. To purchase tickets to the morning event visit here.
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Section Seats
$43 Includes Ricard’s book + Reserved Section Seats
$95 Includes pre-event reception and + Reserved Seats
+ Ricard’s book as well as Iyer’s book.
This event presented in association with InsightLA
Born in France in 1946, Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who left a career in cellular genetics to study Buddhism in the Himalayas nearly 40 years ago. He is an international best-selling author and a prominent speaker on the world stage, celebrated at the World Economic Forum at Davos and at TED where his first talk on happiness has been viewed by over four million people.
His new book is Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World. His previous books have been translated into over twenty languages and include The Monk and the Philosopher; The Quantum and the Lotus; Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill; and Why Meditate?, as well as five photography books.
As a trained scientist and Buddhist monk, he is uniquely positioned in the dialogue between East and West. He is an active participant in the current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives in Nepal and devotes much of his time to the preservation of Tibetan literature and to humanitarian projects in Tibet, India, and Nepal. www.matthieuricard.com
Pico Iyer is the author of twelve books, on subjects as varied as Cuba, globalism, Graham Greene and the XIVth Dalai Lama, and writes up to 100 articles a year for magazines from The New York Review of Books to Harper’s, and Vanity Fair to Wired. He delivered popular TED talks in both 2013 and 2014—his most recent book is a small TED Original on the theme of stillness, and his talk on the nature of home attracted millions of viewers—and he has written a film script for Miramax, done many liner notes for Leonard Cohen and written introductions to more than 50 other books. Born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he has been based, since 1987, in Western Japan, while traveling widely, everywhere from North Korea to Ethiopia and Yemen to Easter Island.
Jack Welch & Suzy Welch
Monday, May 18, 2015
7:45-8:15am Continental Breakfast
8:15-9:15am Forum
Jack Welch and Suzy Welch
in conversation with Peter Guber
The Real-Life MBA: Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career
Gensler
500 South Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission, doors open at 6:45pm
$50 Includes the Welch’s book.
Feature Jack and Suzy Welch in The Wall Street Journal, Feb 21
Jack Welch is the former chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric Co. During his tenure, GE became the world’s most valuable corporation and was consistently voted the most admired company in the world by Fortune magazine. Since 2001, Welch has been active in private equity and consulting, working with dozens of businesses of every size, in a wide variety of industries. Along with speaking to upwards of a million people around the world, Welch has also used his post-GE years to found and lead the Jack Welch Management Institute. In 2014, CNBC named Jack Welch one of the Top 10 “Rebels, Icons and Leaders” of the past 25 years.
Suzy Welch is a best-selling author, television commentator, and noted business journalist. The former editor of Harvard Business Review, she attended Harvard University and Harvard Business School. Her professional experience includes several years at Bain & Company, the management consulting firm, and time as a work-life columnist for ‘O: The Oprah Magazine.’ Mrs. Welch is on the advisory board of the Jack Welch Management Institute and serves on the board of several non-profit organizations.
The bestselling authors of Winning return with a modern, essential guide for everyone in business today—and tomorrow—that explores the most pressing challenges related to creating winning strategies, leading and managing others, and building a thriving career.
In the decade since their bestseller Winning was published, Jack and Suzy Welch have dug deeper into business, traveling the world consulting to organizations of every size and in every industry, speaking before hundreds of audiences, working closely with entrepreneurs from Mumbai to Silicon Valley, and, in 2010, starting their own fully accredited online MBA program, which now has approximately 1,000 students enrolled. Over the same time frame, Jack has advised more than seventy-five companies through private equity, and dozens more in a senior advisory role at IAC. Now, Jack and Suzy Welch draw on their experiences to address the biggest problems facing modern management—and offer pragmatic solutions to overcome them.
Going beyond theories, concepts, and ideologies, they tackle the real stuff of work today. When you get down to it, they argue, winning in business is all about mastering the gritty, inescapable, make-or-break, real-life dilemmas that define the new economy, the old economy, and everything in between. Work is a grind. We just got whacked. My boss is driving me nuts. I’m stuck in career purgatory. My team has lost its mojo. IT is holding us hostage. Our strategy is outdated the day we launch it. We don’t know what our Chinese partners are talking about. We’re just not growing. These are some of the day-to-day issues the Welches take on. Coupled with Jack’s years of iconic leadership and Suzy’s insights as former editor of the Harvard Business Review, their new database of knowledge infuses The Real Life MBA with fresh, relevant stories and equally powerful solutions that every manager at any level can use right now.
Peter Guber is Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group. Prior to Mandalay, Guber was Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Chairman and CEO of Polygram Entertainment, Co-Founder of Casablanca Record & Filmworks and President of Columbia Pictures. Guber produced or executive produced (personally or through his companies) films that garnered five Best Picture Academy Award nominations (winning for Rain Man) and box office hits that include The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Batman, Flashdance, The Kids Are All Right andSoul Surfer. Peter Guber is Owner and Co-Executive Chairman of the NBA franchise, the Golden State Warriors, an Owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and an Owner and Executive Chairman of Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC). He is Chairman of Dick Clark Productions a leading independent producer of television programming including such perennial hits as the American Music Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and So You Think You Can Dance. Guber is Chairman of Mandalay Sports Media. He is an Entertainment and Media Analyst for Fox Business News and a full professor at UCLA. Guber is the author of the #1 NYT bestseller, Tell to Win.
Charlie Palmer with Michael Voltaggio
Thursday, May 7, 2015
8:00pm (Reception 6:30-7:30pm)
Charlie Palmer
in conversation with Michael Voltaggio
discussing his cookbook
Charlie Palmer’s American Fare:
Everyday Recipes from My Kitchens to Yours
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Seats
$50 Includes Palmer’s cookbook + Seat in reserved section
$95 Pre-event reception, the cookbook, Seat in reserved section
In 2013, Voltaggio received the distinction as one of Food & Wine magazine’s best new chefs in the award’s 25th anniversary year, joining an elite list of chefs in America. This was a career highlight for him, considering his humble beginnings nearly 20 years earlier when his first job at 15 was working for his older brother Bryan at a local hotel kitchen in their hometown of Frederick, MD. Following Bryan’s lead into the culinary world, Michael received his formal education by earning a prestigious position at the venerable Greenbrier apprenticeship program in West Virginia, graduating when he was 21(at the time the youngest to have done so).
Previously, Voltaggio spent time at the helm of numerous high-profile kitchens across the country. Some include Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, CA, where he earned a Michelin Star, and The Bazaar by Jose Andres at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills where he earned a 4-star review from the Los Angeles Times and finalist nomination for “best new restaurant” from the James Beard Foundation. Additional accolades include being named Angeleno magazine’s best new chef in 2010 and selected by star chefs as a rising star chef that same year.
He is the author, with his brother, of their first cookbook, aptly titled Volt Ink. – named after their flagship restaurants.
Voltaggio may best be known for his win on Bravo TV’s Emmy award-winning season of Top Chef. He has since made many returns to television with guest appearances on various cooking and food shows. Soon he will be back on the small screen with a new series for Travel Channel currently titled Breaking Borders, slated to air in early 2015.
Jillian Lauren
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
8:00pm
Jillian Lauren
in conversation with Dana Gould
discussing her memoir
Everything You Ever Wanted
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Seats
$33 Includes Lauren’s memoir + Seats in reserved section
Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, and the novel, Pretty. In her new memoir Everything You Ever Wanted (May 2105), she shares her zigzagging path from Brunei harem girl to mommy blogger.
A former concubine and heroin addict, Lauren lived in thirty apartments in four states over the course of ten years. Some might say she was a screw-up of epic proportions. Then she fell in love and decided she just wanted to be a happy wife and mom, and learn to knit and make a fantastic pot roast.
Jillian Lauren is not your typical mom. After a heartbreaking struggle with infertility, Lauren and her husband, Weezer bass player, Scott Shriner, adopted an Ethiopian boy with special needs who forced her to recalibrate her way of looking at the world. Exploring complex ideas of identity and reinvention, Everything You Ever Wanted is a must-read for everyone, especially every mother, who has ever hoped for a second act in life.
Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Flaunt Magazine, The Rumpus, and Salon, among others. Her work has also been widely anthologized, including in The Moth Anthology and True Tales of Lust and Love.
Jillian is a regular storyteller with The Moth and has performed at numerous spoken word and storytelling events across the country. She regularly blogs at MSNBC TODAY Moms, The Huffington Post and Jillianlauren.com, which was named a top 100 mom blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine.
Dana Gould began his professional stand up career at the tender age of 17, cutting his teeth in the comedy boom of the 1980’s. He arrived in Los Angeles in the early 90’s, where he became one of the founding fathers of the alternative comedy movement. After starring in the TV series “Working” and guesting on such shows as The “Ben Stiller Show” and “Seinfeld”, Dana joined the writing staff of “The Simpsons,” eventually becoming executive producer of the legendary show.
Dana left the show and rededicated himself to his stand-up career. In addition to numerous HBO specials and the CD, Funhouse, Dana recently completed the one-hour special “Let Me Put My Thoughts In You”, directed by fellow “Ben Stiller Show” alum Bob Odenkirk.
Dana wrote, produced and starred in the pilot “Nolan Knows Best” for ABC television and, in addition to his podcast, The Dana Gould Hour, which premiered in February 2012, is currently developing, along with the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, a new pilot for F/X, “Rock Bottom.”
Maria Bello with Camryn Manheim
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
8:00pm
Maria Bello
in conversation with Camryn Manheim
Whatever…Love Is Love:
Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves
The Aero Theatre
1328 Montana Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Seats
$43 Includes Bello’s book + Reserved Seats
$95 Includes Pre-reception, Bello’s book + Reserved Seats
Maria Bello is a mother, actor, activist and author. Her essay in the The New York Times, Modern Love column, “Coming Out as a Modern Family” is one of the ten most popular articles in a decade. Visit her website.
In the summer of 2013, lying in a hospital bed with her body riddled with parasites, Maria Bello realized that waiting to do something isn’t always an option. In a moment, everything could end, and all of her stories would be lost—stories of love, family, miracles and madness that filled the hundreds of journals she had been keeping since she was a child. She read through each one of those journals during her months of recovery, in the in process began to uncover who she was and who she had become. And instead of coming to any definitive answers, she found herself asking more and more questions. Part of her questioning was about how to tell her son, then 12 years old that she had fallen in love with a woman. Jack’s response—simple and wise beyond his years was “Whatever, Mom…love is love.” Seeing that Jack didn’t see traditional labels of partnership, Maria began to contemplate the labels she herself had worn during her life.
Her essay “Coming Out as a Modern Family” was featured in the New York Times Modern Love column and started a worldwide conversation about how many of the labels we all know and use are simply outdated today. Partnership, career, love, sexuality, all of these aspects of life are fluid now. We no longer fit into the tidy little boxes, and neither do our lives. Questioning those labels is at the heart of Whatever…Love is Love.
Written as a series of provocative questions and thoughtful answers, and filled with deeply personal, often funny and even passionate stories, in this book Maria bares her soul and shares what she’s learned—about romantic love, but also about her relationship with her parents, her feelings about spirituality, her sexual identity, the highs and lows of her career, her humanitarian work, and her worth as a mother. Using her experience as a gateway to a larger conversation, Maria encourages you to think about the life you lead, who you love, what you do, what you believe in and what you call yourself…and helps you to realize that the only labels that matter are the ones we place on and accept for ourselves, even if they don’t fit the mold of “typical.”
Camryn Manheim is best known for her portrayal of the feisty defense attorney Ellenor Frutt on the Emmy Award winning drama, The Practice, which garnered her an Emmy and Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. She also played Delia Banks, the resident skeptic on the CBS drama, Ghost Whisperer.” She currently plays the all mighty Control on Person of Interest.
Her other film and television credits include: The Hot Flashes, The Makeover, Jewtopia, Hotline, Without Men, Fort McCoy, Camilla Dickinson, Twisted, Scary Movie 3, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Happiness, The Laramie Project, The Road to Wellville, Eraser, Jessie Stone, Two and a Half Men, Will and Grace, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal, How I Met Your Mother, Slipstream, which was written and directed by Anthony Hopkins, and An Unfinished Life, where she shared the screen with Robert Redford.
Raised in the Mid-West and Southern California, Manheim is the daughter of outspoken, politically aware parents who passed their activism on to all of their children. She is a passionate advocate for the rights of the disabled, particularly the deaf. Manheim is a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an active supporter of The Feminist Majority, Planned Parenthood, Waterkeeper Alliance, and a handful of other organizations. She has received honors from the Death Penalty Focus of California, The Western Law Center for Disability Rights, Hadassah, The Jewish Federation, and an honorary member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and was honored by the National Lawyers Guild of Southern California. Visit her website for more information. Her book Wake Up, I’m Fat! (1999) was a New York Times bestseller.
Note: Interviewers at Live Talks Los Angeles events are subject to change.