Ben Stein Keynote Speaker

Ben Stein has worked as an economist at The Department of Commerce, a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. At American U., he taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.

In 1973 and 1974, he was a speech writer and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford. He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barrons, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for twenty years for The American Spectator. He currently writes a column for The New york Times Sunday Business Section and has for many years, a column about personal finance for Yahoo!, is a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, and for Fox News.

He has written, co-written and published thirty books, including seven novels, largely about life in Los Angeles, and twenty-one non-fiction books, about finance and about ethical and social issue in finance, and also about the political and social content of mass culture. He has done pioneering work in uncovering the concealed messages of TV and in explaining how TV and movies get made. His titles include “A License to Steal”, “Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation”, “The View From Sunset Boulevard”, “Hollywood Days”, “Hollywood Nights”, “DREEMZ”, “Financial Passages”, and “Ludes”. His most recent books are the best selling humour self help series, “How To Ruin Your Life”. He has also been a longtime screenwriter, writing the first draft of The Boost, a movie based on Ludes, and the outlines of the lengthy miniseries Amerika, and the acclaimed Murder in Mississippi.

He is also an extremely well known actor in movies, TV, and commercials. His part of the boring teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was recently ranked as one of the fifty most famous scenes in American film. From 1997 to 2002, he was the host of the Comedy Central quiz show, “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” The show has won seven Emmies. He was a judge on CBS’s Star Search, and on VH-1’s “America’s Most Smartest Model.”