Events
Tim O’Reilly with Krisztina “Z” Holly
8pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
Tim O’Reilly
WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us
Cross Campus–Downtown Los Angeles
800 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90017
PURCHASE TICKETS
$50 Reserved Section Seat + book
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm)* + Reserved Seat + book
$20 General Admission Seat
$30 Reserved Section Seat
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. the company that for the past three decades has published the books and organized the conferences where Internet entrepreneurs have learned the tools of their trade. His Safari online learning platform provides subscription based learning products to millions of software developers worldwide. O’Reilly has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. If you’ve heard the term “open source software,” “Web 2.0,” “big data,” or “the maker movement,” you’ve experienced his ability to see and frame the future. O’Reilly graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in Classics. He began working as a technical writer, and soon began writing and publishing his own books on technology topics. On Twitter: @timoreilly
“For anyone who wants to know how to prepare for the future – and how we might shape that future in ways that broadly benefit society, not just technological or entrepreneurial elites—WTF? is an indispensable guide.” — Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
“Tim has been an astute observer of both the successes and the excesses of Silicon Valley. This provocative book distills the lessons he has learned about the power of technology to shape our economy and our lives.” — Hal Varian, Google chief economist
“No one is better at understanding the future than Tim O’Reilly. He has an intuitive feel and a deep knowledge of technology. This book makes sense of the astonishing transformations that are happening around us and is an indispensable guidebook to tomorrow.” — Walter Isaacson, President & CEO, The Aspen Institute
Tim O’Reilly is one of the most prescient observers of emerging technology. Inc Magazine dubbed him “the Oracle of Silicon Valley” and Wired, “the trend spotter.” In his new book — both probing and prophetic — WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, he explores the burning questions posed by technology and the future.
O’Reilly shares some of the techniques his pioneering company has used to make sense of and predict innovation waves. He then applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how technologies such as on-demand services, networks and platforms, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. Finally, he examines the choices we have to make a society moving forward in this brave new world.
In this powerful combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and analysis of how technology affects jobs and the economy, O’Reilly draws on lessons from networked platforms including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and Lyft to show how our economy and financial markets have also become increasingly managed by algorithms. O’Reilly believes that a world ruled by machines that are hostile to humanity is not a distant possibility. Complex systems evolve from much simpler forebears, and the design of the systems we are building today is already shaping the future. He makes the case that income inequality, declining upward mobility, and job losses due to technology are the result of design choices we have made in the algorithms that manage our markets. Just as Google constantly updates its algorithms in pursuit of relevant search and ad results, and as Facebook wrestles with how to rethink its algorithms for user engagement in response to fake news, he believes we must rewrite those algorithms if we wish to create a more human-centered future.
The digital revolution has transformed the world, upending centuries-old companies and business models. Now, it is restructuring every business, every job, and every sector of society. Yet the biggest changes are still ahead.
MIT-trained engineer, tech entrepreneur and adventurer, Krisztina “Z” Holly is the host of The Art of Manufacturing podcast and Founder & Chief Instigator of LA Mayor Garcetti’s MAKE IT IN LA initiative. She is best known for curating and hosting the first ever TEDx (TEDxUSC) in 2009 and founding two innovation centers at MIT and USC. She has an instinct for finding and amplifying undiscovered talent and ideas, whether it’s helping dozens of faculty spin out new venture-backed startups, or curating dozens of speakers whose talks have garnered 14 million views online; ten have appeared on TED.com.
Early on, she played key roles at tech startups, such as Stylus innovation (acquired by Artisoft), Direct Hit Technologies (acquired by Ask Jeeves), and Jeeves Solutions (acquired by Kanisa). She served as Vice Provost for Innovation at USC and has been advisor to nearly two dozen companies and organizations, including the River LA, World Economic Forum, and the Obama Administration.
She is an avid traveler, backcountry skier, mountain biker, and the quartermaster of the Black Rock City airport logistics team in her spare time. She has two engineering degrees from MIT and currently lives and plays in Los Angeles.
Chris Matthews with Frank Buckley
8pm
Chris Matthews
Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$45 General Admission Seat + a copy of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit
$20 General Admission Seat
Chris Matthews is the host of MSNBC’s Hardball. He is the author of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero; Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked; Kennedy and Nixon; Hardball; and now Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.
With his bestselling biography Jack Kennedy, Chris Matthews shared a new look at one of America’s most beloved Presidents and the patriotic spirit that defined him. Now, with Bobby Kennedy, Matthews returns with a gripping, in-depth, behind-the-scenes portrait of one of the great figures of the American twentieth century.
Overlooked by his father, and overshadowed by his war-hero brother, Bobby Kennedy was the perpetual underdog. When he had the chance to become a naval officer like Jack, Bobby turned it down, choosing instead to join the Navy as a common sailor. It was a life changing experience that led him to connect with voters from all walks of life: young or old, black or white, rich or poor. They were the people who turned out for him in his 1968 campaign. RFK would prove himself to be the rarest of politicians—both a pragmatist who knew how to get the job done and an unwavering idealist who could inspire millions.
Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy. He shines a light on all the important moments of his life, from his early years and his start in politics to his crucial role as attorney general in his brother’s administration and his tragic run for president. This definitive book brings Bobby Kennedy to life like never before and is destined to become a political classic.
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.
C. Morgan Babst with Scott Timberg
3:00 pm
Presented in association with
Santa Monica Public Library
An Afternoon with
C. Morgan Babst
in conversation with Scott Timberg
The Floating World
Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium
Santa Monica Public Library
601 Santa Monica Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90401
This event is part of our Newer Voices Series.
General Admission tickets are complimentary, but we encourage you to support these newer authors and purchase their books.
RSVP HERE for free tickets to this event
>>> Pre-purchasing the book includes a Reserved Seat ($29)
Purchase book/Reserved Seat
C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Garden and Gun, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, and the New Orleans Review. The Floating World is her first novel.
“This powerful and lyrical novel captures the emotional currents in New Orleans after Katrina. With an authentic and sensitive voice, Morgan Babst explores family, race, class, and the essence of disruption.”
—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci
“Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdoré family . . . in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm’s emotional impact on those who lived through it.” —People
In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city.
As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic—the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.
This mystery is at the center of Babst’s haunting and profound novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans’s most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told—one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.
Scott Timberg is a Los Angeles-based arts and culture writer. A former Los Angeles Times and Salon staffer, he writes these days for The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review online, LMU Magazine, and the New York Times. Timberg edited, with Dana Gioia, the anthology The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles (Red Hen). He’s the author, most recently, of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press), and runs the accompanying ArtsJournal blog CultureCrash. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMisreadCity.
Scott Adams with Terrence McNally
8pm
Scott Adams
Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$45 General Admission Section Seat + a copy of Win Bigly
$55 Reserved Section Seat + a copy of Win Bigly
From the creator of Dilbert, an unflinching look at the strategies Donald Trump used to persuade voters to elect the most unconventional candidate in the history of the presidency, and how anyone can learn his methods for succeeding against long odds.
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He has been a full-time cartoonist since 1995, after 16 years working in the technology realm at a major bank and later a phone company. His many bestsellers include The Dilbert Principle, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. He is co-founder of WhenHub. For more on Adams, visit his website, and follow him on Twitter: @ScottAdamsSays
Scott Adams—a trained hypnotist and a lifelong student of persuasion—was one of the earliest public figures to predict Trump’s win, doing so a week after Nate Silver put Trump’s odds at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. The mainstream media regarded Trump as a novelty and a sideshow. But Adams recognized in Trump a level of persuasion you only see once in a generation.
Trump triggered massive cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias on both the left and the right. We’re hardwired to respond to emotion, not reason. We might listen to 10 percent of a speech—a hand gesture here, a phrase there—and if the right buttons are pushed, we irrationally agree with the speaker and invent reasons to justify that decision after the fact.
The point isn’t whether Trump was right or wrong, good or bad. Win Bigly goes beyond politics to look at persuasion tools that can work in any setting—the same ones Adams saw in Steve Jobs when he invested in Apple decades ago. For instance:
· If you need to convince people that something is important, make a claim that’s directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration in it. Everyone will spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is while accidentally persuading themselves the issue is a high priority.
· Stop wasting time on elaborate presentations. Inside, you’ll learn which components of your messaging matter, and where you can wing it.
· Creating “linguistic kill shots” with persuasion engineering (such as “Low-energy Jeb”) can be more powerful than facts and policies.
Adams offers nothing less than “access to the admin passwords to human beings.” This is a must-read if you care about persuading others in any field—or if you just want to resist persuasion from others.
Terrence McNally, a strategic communications consultant who helps organizations tell better stories, hosts a weekly interview show on the Progressive Voices Network on TuneIn and a monthly podcast with Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. All podcasts can be found here. For 17 years he hosted an interview show, Free Forum, on KPFK.
Brene Brown
Brené Brown
Braving the Wilderness:
The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone
Barnum Hall
Santa Monica High School
600 Olympic Blvd,
Santa Monica, CA 90405
PURCHASE TICKETS — SOLD OUT.
$55 Orchestra Level Seat + 1 copy of Braving the Wilderness
$40 Balcony Seat + 1 copy of Braving the Wilderness
Social scientist and three-time #1 New York Times bestseller Brené Brown has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives – courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy.
Dr. Brené Brown has spent the past sixteen years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and is the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers – The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong. Brené’s TED talk – The Power of Vulnerability – is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with over 30 million views. She is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation-Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. In addition to her research and writing, Brené is the Founder and CEO of BRAVE LEADERS INC – an organization that brings evidence-based courage building programs to teams, leaders, entrepreneurs, change makers, and culture shifters. Brené lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve, and their children, Ellen and Charlie.
In her new book, Braving the Wilderness, Brown redefines our understanding of what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization. With her trademark mix of research, storytelling, and honesty, Brown will again change the cultural conversation while mapping out a clear path to true belonging.
She writes, “True belonging requires us to believe in and belong to ourselves so fully that we can find sacredness in both being a part of something, and standing alone when necessary. But in a culture that’s rife with perfectionism and pleasing, and with the erosion of civility, it’s easy to stay quiet, hide in our ideological bunkers, or fit in rather than show up as our true selves and brave the wilderness of uncertainty and criticism. But true belonging is not something we negotiate or accomplish with others; it’s a daily practice that demands integrity and authenticity. It’s a personal commitment that we carry in our hearts.”
In her new book, Brown offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness.
Photo Credit: Benedict Evans
Kate Hudson with Jennifer Meyer
Monday, October 30, 2017
8pm
Kate Hudson
in conversation with Jennifer Meyer
discussing her book,
Pretty Fun: Creating and Celebrating a Lifetime of Tradition
The Aero Theater
1328 Montana Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$55 Reserved Section Seat + book*
$45 General Admission + book*
$20 General Admission
* all books are pre-signed and available for pick up at check-in
Kate Hudson is a Golden Globe Award winner and Academy Award–nominated actress, producer, entrepreneur and best-selling author of Pretty Happy. She is best known for her roles in Almost Famous, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Bride Wars, which she also produced. On television, Kate received critical acclaim for her guest-star appearance on the hit show Glee. She is the voice of Mei Mei in Kung Fu Panda 3.
Kate’s love of design and fashion has seen her become an international style icon and muse for some of the world’s top designers. She has also been featured in many global advertising campaigns, most recently the renowned Campari Calendar, and has been the face of major retail brands, including Ann Taylor and Almay.
In 2013, Kate cofounded Fabletics (fabletics.com), a line of stylish and affordable activewear designed to inspire and empower women to get physically fit and as a way of living that promotes health, community, and passion.
In Pretty Fun, Kate Hudson shares her philosophy behind gatherings, how to be in the moment, make them uniquely yours, embracing occasions to just be together. Pretty Fun is a warm and welcoming, lifestyle and entertaining guide, complete with delicious, healthy recipes and even some more indulgent snacks and beverages, and infused with her mindful approach to life.
Jennifer Meyer is a Los Angeles based jeweler whose designs are founded on the idea that jewelry could be more than an accessory. The Jennifer Meyer collection is designed to become an extension of the woman wearing it — a symbol of luck, celebration & love — a way for every woman to reflect on the important milestones in her life.
After working in communications for visionaries like Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani, in 2005, the time finally came to share her own creative vision – to start telling her unique story. More than a business endeavor, making jewelry has been a part of Jen’s life since learning to make pieces from enamel at the age of six from her grandmother, California artist Edith Meyer. As an adult, Jen made pieces to mark important milestones in her life; to celebrate friends, and remember family. The brand started as a way for Jen to not only reconnect to her roots, but also pay homage to the women who inspired her along the way. Visit her website.