Blog
Food events at Live Talks LA: Mark Bittman (Oct 16); Yotam Ottolenghi (Oct 23) & Marcus Samuelsson (Oct 28)
Mark Bittman, Yotam Ottolenghi and Marcus Samuelsson speak at Live Talks LA, October 2014
We are excited about a series of food events at Live Talks Los Angeles this fall. All three are held at All Saints Church, Beverly Hills and are preceded by a reception with selections prepared from each of the cookbooks featured. We feature Mark Bittman on October 16, Yotam Ottolenghi on October 23 and Marcus Samuelsson on October 28.
October 16, Mark Bittman — one of America’s best-known and most widely respected food writers. He covers food policy, cooking, and eating as an Opinion columnist for The New York Times and the paper’s Sunday Magazine. He produced “The Minimalist” column for 13 years and has starred in several popular Public Television cooking series. Now a frequent public speaker, he appears regularly on the Today Show and is a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows. Bittman has authored more than a dozen cookbooks, including How to Cook Everything® The Basics, How to Cook Everything®, How to Cook Everything® Vegetarian (all available as apps), Food Matters and The Food Matters Cookbook, and the new VB6™: Eat Vegan Before 6:00. Visit his website. In How to Cook Everything Fast, Bittman provides a game plan for becoming a better, more intuitive cook while you wake up your weekly meal routine with 2,000 main dishes and accompaniments that are simple to make, globally inspired, and bursting with flavor.
October 23, Yotam Ottolenghi who owns an eponymous group of four restaurants, plus the high-end restaurant, Nopi, in London. His previous cookbooks—Plenty, Jerusalem, and Ottolenghi—have all been on the New York Times bestseller list. He writes for The Guardian, and appears on BBC. Plenty More is the much anticipated follow-up to Ottolenghi’s bestselling and award-winning cookbook Plenty, featuring 120 vegetarian dishes organized by cooking method. Plenty influenced the way people cook and eat vegetables. Its focus on flavorful, vegetable-centric dishes that emphasize spices and fresh ingredients caused a produce-cooking craze in the UK, the US, and the world over. Plenty More continues in the spirit of Plenty, with dazzling dishes, prepared raw, grilled, baked, simmered, cracked, or braised. It features recipes for main dishes, sides, salads, and sweets including Membrillo and Stilton Quiche, Buttermilk-Crusted Okra, Candy Beets with Lentils, Roasted Rhubarb with Sweet Labneh, and Quince Poached in Pomegranate Juice.
October 28, Marcus Samuelsson, owner of Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem and former Executive Chef and co-owner of New York’s Restaurant Aquavit, AQ Cafe at Scandinavia House, and Riingo. The youngest chef ever to receive two three-star ratings from The New York Times, he starred on Discovery Home Channel’s Inner Chef. His cookbooks include Aquavit and the New Scandinavian Cuisine, The Soul of a New Cuisine, which won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for best international cookbook, and New American Table. He is winner of Top Chef Masters, and a judge on Chopped. In 2009, he was chosen by President Obama to cook the first state dinner. In his latest cook book, Marcus Off Duty, Samuelsson shows how he cooks at home for family and friends. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, and trained in European kitchens, he is a world citizen turned American success story. The recipes blend a rainbow of the flavors he experienced in his travels—Ethiopian, Swedish, Mexican, Caribbean, Italian, and Southern soul. His eclectic, casual food includes dill-spiced salmon; coconut-lime curried chicken; mac, cheese, and greens; chocolate pie spiced with Indian garam masala; and for kids, peanut noodles with slaw.
Previous food events at Live Talks Los Angeles include: Marcus Samuelsson in 2012 discussing his memoir; Daniel Boulud with Jonathan Gold and Suzanne Goin with Russ Parsons. Videos to each are in the links.
Peter Thiel, Co-founder, PayPal to speak at Live Talks LA October 2
We’re excited to be exclusively hosting Peter Thiel, Co-founder of PayPal on October 2, 2014, in Santa Monica. Ticket info.
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel first gained attention for innovations in banking and startup finance. In 1998, Thiel made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding and leading PayPal, which now has more than 128 million active financial accounts. In 2002, PayPal sold to eBay and he founded a global macro fund, Clarium. He works to accelerate innovation by identifying and funding promising technology ideas and by guiding successful companies to scale and dominate their industries.
In 2004, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, which offers platforms for finance companies and intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to integrate, visualize, and analyze the world’s information. In the same year, he made the first outside investment in Facebook, whose board he serves on, and now has more than a billion active members.
Building on his personal success as a venture capital investor, Thiel co-founded and manages Founders Fund, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital fund that has pioneered new methods of venture financing that benefit founders. Through Founders Fund, as well as through his private investing, he has helped the next generation of tech companies, such as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, RoboteX, and Spotify.
And in 2012 he co-founded Mithril Capital Management, an international technology investment fund.
Thiel established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which promotes freedom in all its forms. He sponsors the Committee to Protect Journalists, The Seasteading Institute, and the Human Rights Foundation. He funds the artificial intelligence research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He also aids work against violence through the Oslo Freedom Forum and through the research of philosopher René Girard, which is extended and promulgated by Imitatio. He also promotes better health by funding the longevity research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and the SENS Research Foundation.
Thiel created the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which nurtures the tech visionaries of tomorrow. And he formed Breakout Labs to help independent scientists, engineers, and inventors advance their most radical ideas.
Thiel earned a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and technology and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. His articles have appeared in Policy Review and the Wall Street Journal. He co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, was rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, and received the Innovation Award from the Economist in 2010. He lives in San Francisco.
ZERO TO ONE (co-authored with Blake Masters) is Thiel’s impassioned plea for an entirely new way of thinking about innovation, urging future business leaders not to compete on well-trodden paths but to explore a new frontier, stake their claim, and do something that has never been done. It is about the questions one must ask to find value in unexpected places. It is at an optimistic view of what the future of progress looks like in America and an intellectual meditation on the nature of innovation and other challenges of today’s business world of which Thiel writes: “If American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands, of miracles. We call these miracles technology.”
In recent decades there have been rapid advances in information technology, but there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley for that matter. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It requires just one thing: a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and ask oneself the question: what valuable company is nobody building?
ZERO TO ONE does teach is the most important skill every future business leader must master: the ability to think for oneself.
Thiel’s often contrary views underscore his point; that to build the future we must challenge convention and believe that what lies ahead is a world where things are not only different but better. Among the many ideas presented, he takes on such topics as:
- The fallacy of “lean” methodology so widely embraced by startups
- The benefit of monopolies and why capitalism cannot thrive without them
- The limitations of globalization and its detriment to innovation
- The ideology of competition in business and academia that poses a threat to creativity
- Man vs. Machine: why computers will never really replace people
These topics and more were at the core of a course taught by Peter Thiel at Stanford University in 2012, the goal of which was to help students see beyond the world of academia and on to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of the students taking that course, Blake Masters, took detailed notes on Thiel’s lectures and posted them on his blog. Within days, they had circulated far beyond the campus and generated over 350,000 readers and more than a million page views. Those notes have been revised, expanded, and refined to form the backbone of ZERO TO ONE.
JDate and Live Talks Los Angeles hook up
JDate and Live Talks LA hook up
A little over a year ago, after an event at Track 16 at Bergamot Station, a couple came up and introduced themselves. They had enjoyed several of our events, but specifically wanted to share that they had met at a Live Talks Los Angeles event, started dating and were engaged. How cool, we thought. Maybe more of that happens at our events that we are not aware of. Or maybe we can instigate more of that.
Today, we are excited to announce our new partnership with JDate — the largest and most successful online Jewish community. Our partnership offers the thousands of JDaters in Los Angeles exclusive access to all Live Talks Los Angeles events. As part of the partnership, JDate members receive 15 percent off all Live Talks Los Angeles events. Select events will also provide singles the exciting opportunity to participate in JDate’s “VIP Blind JDate” program, which allows JDaters to enter a contest for a chance to be matched up on a blind date with another member, while enjoying an exclusive meet-and-greet with a featured guest appearing at Live Talks LA. In fact the only way to get a ticket to our sold out James Franco event this Sunday evening is by winning the JDate blind date contest. Among other things, the two winners will receive premium tickets to the event, an exclusive meet-and-greet, and an autographed copy of his book.
Live Talks LA is a stage for stories to be shared — both on stage, as well as in the audience. We’re excited about our partnership with JDate and look forward to welcoming JDate members to our various Los Angeles venues. We feel such events are great connectors and an opportunity for people with similar interests to meet and connect, as well as a venue to be introduced to voices one might not be too familiar with, much like a first date!”
Mini organ performance will precede our Malcolm Gladwell event on Oct 7
We’re excited about our upcoming event with Malcolm Gladwell on October 7th. It’s the first in a series of events we are presenting with Wilshire Boulevard Temple at both their locations — the renovated sanctuary in Korea Town as well as their Westside campus. Over 1400 tickets have been sold for this event, and we look forward to more compelling conversations in this gorgeous space. Given the crowd we expect, and being a new venue, we encourage our guests to arrive early. Doors open at 7:15pm and the event starts at 8pm. We are excited that the Temple’s organist, William Beck will perform on this newly renovated organ before the talk which starts at 8pm. We encourage you to arrive early to enjoy this special performance. Purchase tickets here.
As part of the renovation of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the Kimball organ, which was installed in 1929, the year the building opened, was completely refurbished and was played for the first time on Erev (the eve of) Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday, September 4th. The 4,102 pipes were removed, as was the console, packed into two 18-wheeler trucks, and shipped to Schantz Organ Company in Ohio, where each piece was cleaned and restored. It was shipped back this summer and reinstalled over a period of almost four weeks by a team of experts who came out from Ohio.
Live Talks LA Special discount for folks impacted by the Government shut down
Malcolm Gladwell poster
We are very excited about our upcoming event with Malcolm Gladwell that we present in association with Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Gladwell will be in conversation with Tim Long, a writer/producer on The Simpsons. Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. The event is a GO LA pick of the week by the LA Weekly. Ticket info here.
Like many fellow Americans, we are saddened about the impasse that has caused the shut down of the Government, and feel bad about the many good people impacted by this. Until this is resolved we will be allocating a block of tickets specifically for furloughed government employees at the special discount of 20% off tickets. For folks impacted by the shut down wishing to use these tickets, we ask you to use the promotional code “CONGRESS” when you check out at our ticket page. The 1000+ coming to this event will warmly welcome you.
Since we cannot exactly call your place of work to confirm that you have been furloughed because your place of work is closed due to the shut down, we are doing this on the honor system. This offer is currently good for our upcoming event with Malcolm Gladwell on October 7.
Susan Orlean to interview Erica Jong at Live Talks LA, Oct 30
Susan Orlean
We are excited to share that Susan Orlean will interview Erica Jong at our Live Talks Los Angeles event on October 30th (Moss Theatre, Santa Monica). The occasion is the 4oth anniversary of Erica Jong’s novel, Fear of Flying. Ticket info here.
Susan Orlean is author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend and The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. Orlean is fascinated by American stories of every stripe. From Rin Tin Tin, the orphaned German shepherd who became a silent film star in the 1920’s, to John Laroche, the convicted felon who slinks through the swamps of southern Florida looking for rare orchids, Orlean has an eye for the moving, the hilarious, and the surprising. She has written for The Boston Globe,Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, and The New Yorker, and has edited both Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Orlean’s writing has inspired two films, including Adaptation, the Academy Award-winning film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Meryl Streep. Orlean lectures on Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, her encounters with extraordinary people, her experiences traveling the world, the value of ignorance, and women and the media.