Ben Stein

Right here is everything you’d ever want to know about our speaker Ben Stein, excluding his shoe size and length of his left arm.  

Benjamin J. Stein was born November 25, 1944 in Washington, D.C., (He is the son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein) grew up in Silver Spring, MA, where he attended Montgomery Blair High School. Ben graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with a degree and honors in economics. Then in 1970 he graduated from Yale Law School as valedictorian of his class, by election of his classmates. He also attended Yale’s graduate school of economics. Our speaker Ben Stein has worked as a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., an economist at The Department of Commerce, a  poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA and at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At American U. He taught about the social and political content of mass culture. 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 and then for Gerald Ford. (He did NOT write the line, “I am not a crook.”). The sought-after speaker Ben Stein has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.), 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 a lot of national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, E! Online, New York Magazine, 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, this is a column about personal finance for Yahoo! He is also a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, and for Fox News.

Our speaker Ben Stein has written, co-written and published thirty books, including seven novels and twenty-one nonfiction books, about finance and about ethical and social issue in finance, and also about the social and political 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, and more. His most recent books are the best selling humor self help series, How To Ruin Your Life. He was one of the creators of the well regarded comedy, Fernwood Tonight.

He is also an extremely well known actor in TV, movies, and commercials. His part of the boring teacher in the film, 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.”

He lives with his wife, Alexandra Denman, six cats and three large dogs in Beverly Hills. He is active in pro-animal and pro-life charitable events.