This talk took place on July 7, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Terry McMillan is the bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and The Interruption of Everything and the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. Each of Ms. McMillan’s seven previous novels was a New York Times bestseller, and four have been made into movies: Waiting to Exhale (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995); How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998); Disappearing Acts (HBO Pictures, 1999); and A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Lifetime, 2014). McMillan fell in love with books as a teenager while working at the local library. She studied journalism at UC Berkeley and screenwriting at Columbia before making her fiction debut with Mama, which won both the Doubleday New Voices in Fiction Award and the American Book Award.
Visit her website.

In I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young’s wonderful life–great friends, family, and successful career–aren’t enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist, and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love. Like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, I Almost Forgot About You shows what can happen when you face your fears, take a chance, and open yourself up to life, love, and the possibility of a new direction.

Lisa Napoli is a career journalist who has worked at The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and has covered arts and culture for KCRW.  She’s the author of the book, Radio Shangri-La, about her time in and around the kingdom of Bhutan, where she went to start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule.  She is the author of the upcoming book, The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away, to be published November 2016. She is the proud recipient of the 2014 Halo Award from the Deutsch Family Foundation for a monthly volunteer cooking group she leads at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row.

This talk took place on September 25, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of the best seller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Her most recent book, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, was an unflinching dissection of the post-9/11 American psyche in the media, popular culture and in political life.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, among other publications.

“In the Darkroom is an absolute stunner of a memoir―probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect. Ms. Faludi is determined both to demystify the father of her youth―‘a simultaneously inscrutable and volatile presence, a black box and a detonator’―and to re-examine the very notion and nature of identity.”―The New York Times

In The Darkroom is Susan Faludi’s most personal book to date—an extraordinary inquiry into her family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, she felt compelled to confront a past she knew little about and a person she had long put aside. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known? What did this mean for her as a feminist and daughter? If who we are is most profoundly forged by who our parents are, what did her father’s metamorphosis say about her own identity?  Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood in Westchester County, New York, and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest, commercial photographer who had built his career on the alteration of images.

Lisa Napoli is a career journalist who has worked at The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and has covered arts and culture for KCRW.  She’s the author of the book, Radio Shangri-La, about her time in and around the kingdom of Bhutan, where she went to start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule.  She is the author of the upcoming book, The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away, to be published November 2016. She is the proud recipient of the 2014 Halo Award from the Deutsch Family Foundation for a monthly volunteer cooking group she leads at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row.

This talk took place on June 8, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

This talk took place on September 20, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

This talk took place on October 31, 2016 at the Bootleg Theatre inLos Angeles and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Shep Gordon — in his storied career as a talent manager, agent, and producer — has worked with, and befriended, some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, from Alice Cooper to Bette Davis, Raquel Welch to Groucho Marx, Blondie to Jimi Hendrix, Sylvester Stallone to Salvador Dalí, Luther Vandross to Teddy Pendergrass. He is also credited with inventing the “celebrity chef,” and has worked with Nobu Matsuhisa, Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, Roger Vergé, and many others. 

“Reality has never seemed to important in the 50 years Shep and I have been working together.  When we need something to happen, Shep just works his magic to simply MAKE it a reality.  I’m still not sure how he does it—he just has that natural ability to create scenarios and relationships that help to get you where you need to go.” –Alice Cooper

“The amazing, incredible, unlikely-but-true story of the man who’s done everything, been everywhere, and was at seemingly every important moment in musical and culinary history. He’s a one-man history of cool. And through it all, he’s somehow managed to remain a mensch. Shep Gordon is a legend.”–Anthony Bourdain

Supermensch is an eye-popping peek into entertainment industry from the magnetic force who has worked with an impeccable roster of stars throughout his storied career.

In this engaging memoir, the charismatic entertainment legend recalls his life, from his humble beginnings as a “shy, no self-esteem, Jewish nebbisher kid with no ambition” in Oceanside, Long Island, to his unexpected rise as one of the most influential and respected personalities in show business, revered for his kindness, charisma—and fondness for a good time.

Gordon shares riotous anecdotes and outrageous accounts of his free-wheeling, globe-trotting experiences with some of the biggest celebrities of the past five decades, including his first meeting with Janice Joplin in 1968, when the raspy singer punched him in the face. They Call Me Supermensch is a sincere, hilarious behind-the-scenes look at the worlds of music and entertainment from the consummate Hollywood insider.

Alice Cooper pioneered a grandly theatrical brand of hard rock that was designed to shock.  Drawing equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock, the group created a stage show that featured electric chairs, guillotines, fake blood and boa constrictors. He continues to tour regularly, performing shows worldwide with the dark and horror-themed theatrics that he’s best known for. 

Alice has been touring consistently, year in and year out, averaging over 80 concerts annually, both within the USA and internationally, with his band which features the three guitar attack of guitarists Ryan Roxie, Nita Strauss, and Tommy Henriksen, plus the rhythm section of drummer Glen Sobel and longtime bassist Chuck Garric.

This talk took place on June 7, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Sebastian Junger has spent decades of his life reporting from conflict zones worldwide. He is the New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the documentary Restrepo based on his embed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Academy Award nomination. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism.

Maximilian Uriarte enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 2006 at the age of nineteen and served for four years. During his first deployment to Iraq in 2007 he served as an MRAP turret gunner and dismount of India Company’s Jump Platoon in the Zaidon region southeast of Fallujah. He deployed to Iraq again in 2009 as a billeted Combat Photographer and Combat Artist. In 2010 Uriarte created the popular comic strip Terminal Lancewhile still on active duty. The strip is now published in theMarine Corps Times and has grown immensely in popularity, with over 490,000 Facebook followers and one million unique hits per month at terminallance.com. Uriarte has a bachelor’s degree from California College of the Arts.

Combining history, psychology and anthropology, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging  picks up where War left off—specifically with the problems Vets face when presented with the irony that there are elements of battle that they, counterintuitively, miss. These positive feelings come from the innate human preference to live in small groups defined by clear purpose. This connection has been lost in modern society, and regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.

Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. Junger explains the irony that—for many veterans as well as civilians—war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today’s divided world.

Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction are combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today.

Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today’s divided world.

This talk took place on May 19, 2016 at the Gensler in downtown Los Angeles and is part of the Live Talks Business Forum which is part of  Live Talks Los Angeles.

This talk took place on June 21, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

This talk took place September 14, 2016, at the William Turner Gallery at Bergamot Arts Station, Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Maria Semple is the author of This One Is Mine and Where’d You Go, Bernadette,which has been translated into eighteen languages. Her TV credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan, and Ellen. She graduated from Barnard College with a degree in English. Today Will Be Different is her third novel.

This talk took place September 14, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

This talk took place August 29, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Since retiring from professional basketball, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a lauded observer of culture and society. He now brings that keen insight to the fore in Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White. He uses his unique blend of erudition, street smarts and authentic experience in essays on the country’s seemingly irreconcilable partisan divide – both racial and political, parenthood, and his own experiences as an athlete, African-American, and a Muslim. The book is not just a collection of expositions; he also offers keen assessments of and solutions to problems such as racism in sports while speaking candidly about his experiences on the court and off.

Timed for publication as the nation debates whom to send to the White House, the combination of plain talk on issues, life lessons, and personal stories places Writings on the Wall squarely in the middle of the conversation, as many of Abdul-Jabbar’s topics are at the top of the national agenda. Whether it is sparring with Donald Trump, within the pages of TIME magazine, or full-length features in the The New York Times Magazine, writers, critics, and readers have come to agree on what The Washington Post observed: Abdul-Jabbar “has become a vital, dynamic and unorthodox cultural voice.”

Jim Hill has been a fixture on CBS 2 in Los Angeles for more than 30 years. He appears on the station’s weekday 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts and also hosts the weekend editions of “Sports Central” – Southern California’s most comprehensive sports newscast. In addition, he co-hosts “LTV,” the Los Angeles Lakers pre-game show on KCAL 9, where he joins Lakers legend James Worthy.

Hill, who played defensive back in the National Football League, draws upon his experience as a player, his talents as a broadcaster and relationships with top athletes and coaches to deliver his award-winning sports reports.

This talk took place October 17, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Julissa Arce is a writer, speaker, and social-justice advocate. She is the cofounder and chairman of the Ascend Educational Fund, a college scholarship and mentorship program that assists immigrant students, regardless of their immigration status, ethnicity, or national origin. Julissa is also a board member for the National Immigration Law Center and for College Spring. Prior to becoming an advocate, she built a successful career on Wall Street, working at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Visit her website.

America Ferrera is an award-winning actress and producer who is perhaps best known for her breakthrough role as “Betty Suarez” on ABC’s hit comedy, Ugly Betty, for which she was recognized with a Golden Globe®, Emmy®  and Screen Actors Guild Award®, as well as ALMA and Imagen Awards. 

Ferrera currently produces and stars in the new NBC workplace comedy, Superstore, in it’s second season.

What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States?

Julissa Arce knows first hand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple-and often just plain wrong.

On the surface, Arce’s story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends.

From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce-the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs-had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today–people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. By opening up about the story of her successes, her heartbreaks, and her long-fought journey to emerge from the shadows and become an American citizen, Arce shows us the true cost of achieving the American dream-from the perspective of a woman who had to scale unseen and unimaginable walls to get there.

This talk took place September 26, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Jay McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, sold to Random House for $7500, and, when published in 1984, catapulted him into the ranks of literary sensation.  Since then, he’s written six other novels, a collection of short stories, and three collections of essays on wine. A student of Raymond Carver and a former fact-checker at The New Yorker, McInerney wrote a wine column for the Wall Street Journal for four years. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.

David L. Ulin is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

McInerney’s first novel in ten years unfolds across a period of stupendeous change—including Obama’s historic election and the global economic collapse. In Bright, Precious Days, he revists his characters Corinne and Russell Calloway, who are living the dream life in New York City.  They find themselves — and their marriage — tested more severely than they ever could have imagined, as Russell, an independent publisher, encounters an audacious, potentially game-changing opportunity, and Corinne, devoted to feeding the poor, faces a man with whom she’d had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11.  

This talk took place October 18, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Jane Alexander has appeared in 75 films, including Testament, Kramer vs. Kramer, All the President’s Men, The Great White Hope, Brubaker, The Cider House Rules, Sunshine State, Feast of Love, and Terminator Salvation. She has performed in more than 100 plays, among them The Great White Hope, The Visit and The Sisters Rosensweig, appearing on Broadway, London’s West End, and in regional theaters from Atlanta to Los Angeles. She has received, in addition to a Tony and two Emmys, an Obie, a Drama Desk Award, and a Theatre World Award, as well as being inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. She is an impassioned wildlife proponent and conservationist, and former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts.  In 2012, she received the Indianapolis Prize’s inaugural Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award. She lives in upstate New York and Nova Scotia with her husband, the award-winning director Ed Sherin.

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.

n Wild Things, Wild Places: Adventurous Tales of Wildlife and Conservation and Conservation on Planet Earth, Jane Alexander writes of her steady and fervent immersion into the worlds of wildlife conservation, how she’s come to know the scientists throughout the world–to her, the prophets in the wilderness–who are steeped in this work, of her travels to the most remote and forbidding areas of the world as they try to save many species, including ourselves.

This talk took place September 8, 2016, at the the theatre at United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Dr. Daniel J. Levitin is the author of three #1 bestselling books: This is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind.  He is also the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, where he runs the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception and Expertise. 

Larry Vincent is the founder of UTA Brand Studio and serves as Chief Branding Officer at UTA. Over the last two decades, Larry has worked with globally beloved brands including Barbie, Disney, MasterCard, Microsoft, the NFL, Oakley, Playstation, Fisher-Price, and the Four Seasons. He is an award-winning writer and speaker whose last book, Brand Real, was selected by strategy+business magazine as one of the best business books of 2012.

This talk took place September 8, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Dr. Daniel J. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he also helped to establish the Mindful Awareness Research Center.  He also heads up the Mindsight Institute, an educational center devoted to promoting insight, compassion, and empathy in individuals, families, institutions, and communities. Dr. Siegel’s books include three New YorkTimes bestsellers: 
Brainstorm, and, with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D, The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. As a lecturer, he’s spoken before King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, at Google University, and TEDx.

This talk took place October 26, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica, CA as part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Carole Bayer Sager is an Oscar, Grammy and two time Golden Globe winner.  For five decades, she has been among the most admired and successful songwriters responsible for lyrical contributions to over 400 songs.  She recorded three solo albums and with Marvin Hamlisch and wrote the hit Broadway musical They’re Playing Our Song. She has collaborated with some of the greatest composers and musical artists of our time, including Bette Midler, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and Carole King, among many others. She is a member of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and was awarded a Star on Hollywood Boulevard.  

This talk took place October 13, 2016, at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica, CA as part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series.

Bryan Cranston won four Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of Walter White in AMC’s Breaking Bad. In 2014 he won a Tony Award for his role as Lyndon B. Johnson in the bio-play All the Way. In film, Cranston has won two Screen Actors Guild Awards and received an Academy Award nomination for his leading role in Trumbo. Among his numerous television and film appearances, he was nominated for a Golden Globe and three Emmys for his portrayal of Hal in FOX’s Malcolm in the Middle.

Jay Roach is the director of All The Way, based on the Tony-Award winning play by Robert Schenkkan. Bryan Cranston reprises his role as President Lyndon B. Johnson alongside Melissa Leo, Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella. 

Roach was awarded a total of four Emmy’s for his directing on the made for television movies Recount in 2008 and Game Change in 2012. As a director, his most recent film, Trumbo, stars Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s blacklisted screenwriters in the 1940s. The film, which also stars Elle Fanning, Helen Mirren and Diane Lane, was released by Bleecker Street on November 6, 2015.  In addition, Roach is known for directing movies such as Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, the Austin Powers trilogy and The Campaign.

Along with directing, Roach has also spent time as a producer on a number of moves including 50 First Dates, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Borat, Little Fockers and Sisters.

This talk took place September 19, 2016, at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Alan Cumming is an award-winning actor, artist, writer, activist, photographer, and raconteur. He has won an Olivier award for his work on the London stage, and a Tony for his work on Broadway; he appeared in all seven seasons of The Good Wife on CBS for which he received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. He is currently touring a cabaret show Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs and recently released an album of the same name. He is the author of novel Tommy’s Tale and the New York Times best-selling memoir Not My Father’s Son. He last appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles to mark the publication Not My Father’s Son.

Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of The New York Times bestseller I See You Made an Effort, a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor Writing 2015. Other books: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up and Fired! The former co-host of Dinner and a Movie on TBS, her acting credits include television shows like Boston Legal, Dexter, Medium and Seinfeld and critically acclaimed appearances on stage Off-Broadway and in regional theaters. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, O Magazine, More, The Los Angeles Times and NPR. Her theatrical adaptation of I See You Made an Effort hit the road for a national tour in late 2016. She most recently is the author of a new memoir Where Ever You Go, There They Are released in 2017.

Put David Sedaris and Glenn O’Brien in a blender and add a dash of New York and Hollywood gossip, and you wind up with Alan Cumming. In You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: And Other Stories, Alan Cumming takes the reader on a wild journey of pithy and cheeky fun, presenting his real-life stories of debauchery during late night Hollywood parties, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and hilarious yet poignant memories of his life, family, and friends. In this new book, he recounts hysterical and sometimes embarrassing encounters, from awkwardly entertaining Elizabeth Taylor at Carrie Fisher’s birthday party to being on a movie set with Helen Mirren and being mocked for wearing Croc sandals to making a friend’s day by chasing down Oprah at a glitzy gala for a prized photograph with her. These forty-five stories are humorous novellas, each featuring memorable photographs—many simply snapshots taken by Cumming—that document or illustrate the tale told.