A world-renowned heart surgeon, Dr. Marc Gillinov’s goal is to keep you out of his Cleveland Clinic operating room. After performing open-heart surgery on more than 7,000 people, ranging from Oscar-winning actors to his local barber, Dr. Gillinov now shares the secrets that will put you on the path to a long life, free of heart disease.

One of the nation’s busiest cardiac surgeons, Dr. Gillinov practices at the Cleveland Clinic, America’s #1 heart hospital. He trained in general and cardiac surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He attended medical school at Johns Hopkins, where he graduated first in his class, and did his undergraduate work at Yale University.

Over the last decade, Dr. Gillinov has taken his message of heart health on the road. He wants people to recognize two critical facts: 1) No matter who you are, heart disease is your number one health threat and 2) You control your fate.  Co-author of the book HEART 411: The Only Guide to Heart Health You’ll Ever Need, Dr. Gillinov is a weekly contributor to the Cleveland Fox News affiliate and a regular health blogger on the Huffington Post. As a speaker, he brings his inspiring, entertaining and life-saving perspectives on heart health to audiences around the country.

Philip Moeller is the co-author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller, GET WHAT’S YOURS: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, the indispensable guide to retiring with all the Social Security benefits earned over a lifetime of work, published by Simon & Schuster.  His next project will be GET WHAT’S YOURS – Medicare: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Medicare Coverage, to be published in 2016 by Simon & Schuster.

Moeller writes about retirement for Money magazine, the PBS website Making Sen$e (Ask Phil the Medicare Maven) and other media outlets.  He is also a research fellow at the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College, and the founder of Insure.com, a site for insurance information that has provided original insurance content to the Web’s leading business portals, including Microsoft, Yahoo, America Online, and MarketWatch.  Formerly a contributing editor at U. S. News & World Report, he has spent forty years as an award-winning financial journalist, Internet entrepreneur, and corporate communications executive for a Fortune 500 financial services firm.  He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Seth Rosenfeld is an award-winning investigative journalist, book author and expert on public access to government records. His first book, SUBVERSIVES: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, was published in hardback in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in paperback in 2013 by Picador, and became a New York Times best-seller.

SUBVERSIVES traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures who clashed at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile student radical Mario Savio, and the liberal University of California president Clark Kerr. Through these converging narratives, Rosenfeld tells a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters and secret detention lists. He reveals how the FBI’s covert operations — led by Reagan’s friend J. Edgar Hoover — helped ignite an era of student protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically. SUBVERSIVES provides a fresh look at the legacy of the sixties, sheds new light on one of America’s most popular presidents, and tells a timely cautionary tale about the dangers of secrecy and unchecked power.

Rosenfeld began the research that would lead to SUBVERSIVES in 1981, while a journalism student at UC Berkeley writing for the campus newspaper. Little did he know he was embarking on what would become a three-decade legal odyssey into the FBI’s covert campus activities; that he would bring five lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act in a precedent-setting legal fight; and that seven federal judges would order the FBI to release more than 300,000 pages of once-secret files and pay his pro-bono attorney’s fees of more than $1 million. These cases revealed the bureau’s covert operations at one of the nation’s preeminent public universities and strengthened the public’s right to know. The New York Times Book Review called SUBVERSIVES “electrifying.” NPR’s On the Media cited its “stunning revelations,” and Bookforum described it as “a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and narrative propulsion.”

Rosenfeld was a staff reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle for nearly 25 years, focusing on legal affairs and law enforcement. His stories exposing Dow Corning Corporation’s cover-up of manufacturing defects in silicone gel breast implants that caused women to undergo avoidable surgery led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to restrict the use of implants, and won a George Polk Award for Health Reporting. Rosenfeld’s articles have also won honors from the Society of Professional Journalists; Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.; the American Association of University Professors; and Harvard University’s Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting.

Rosenfeld has been featured on National Public Radio and other national and local broadcasts, and has given many talks. His topics include the conflicts between civil liberties and national security; the Freedom of Information Act, excessive government secrecy and the role of the press in democracy; Ronald Reagan’s hidden relationship with the FBI in the years before he became president; and the secret history of the FBI’s activities during the sixties and how they affected individuals, institutions, and politics.

Journalist Dennis McDougal (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, TV Guide, etc.) is the bestselling author of twelve books, including most recently DYLAN: The Biography released by Turner Publishing in May of 2014. In a career dating to the 1970s, he has also authored hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and produced award-winning TV documentaries.

Before he began covering movies and media as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, McDougal reported for dailies in Riverside and Long Beach, California. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in journalism at UCLA and won a John S. Knight Fellowship in 1981, spending a year teaching and studying psychology and law at Stanford University. A producer for CNN during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, McDougal has won more than fifty honors, including a George Foster Peabody Award. He is the award-winning biographer of Jack Nicholson, Bob Dylan, Universal Studios chieftain Lew Wasserman and the Los Angeles Times’ Otis Chandler. McDougal was featured in the 2009 PBS documentary that he co-produced about the late Los Angeles Times publisher, “Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times.” He has lectured in journalism and creative writing at UCLA, Stanford, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State Long Beach. He and his wife Sharon live near Memphis, Tennessee.

David Cay Johnston is an investigative journalist and the winner of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for uncovering loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code, while reporting for The New York Times. He has served as president of the 5,700-member Investigative Reporters & Editors and is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling trilogy Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print. His latest book is the world-wide bestseller The Making of Donald Trump, now in 10 languages. He is the editor of Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, recently published by The New Press. He teaches at Syracuse University College of Law.

Johnston is a columnist for The Daily Beast, Investopedia and Tax Notes and a frequent contributor  commentator on economic issues, on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, PBS, CNN, BBC, CBC and numerous public radio shows.

A native San Franciscan, David Downie lived in New York City, Providence, Rome and Milan before moving to Paris in the mid-1980s. He divides his time between France and Italy. His travel, food and arts features have appeared in over 50 leading print publications worldwide.

Downie’s latest book is A PASSION FOR PARIS: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light (Spring 2015, St. Martin’s Press), a lively literary romp through Paris from the Romantic Age to the present. Among Downie’s many other nonfiction books are the classic critically acclaimed collection of travel essays PARIS, PARIS: Journey into the City of Light, and the bestselling PARIS TO THE PYRENEES: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James. An authority on Italian and French food and wine Downie has authored half a dozen works on these topics, including COOKING THE ROMAN WAY: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks of Rome, and three award-winning volumes of Terroir Guide/Food Wine travel-food-and-wine books. He is also the author of two thrillers including PARIS CITY OF NIGHT. Downie’s Paris Timeline and Food Wine Rome travel apps are available from iTunes.

A frequent speaker about Paris, France, Rome and the Italian Riviera, Downie is co-owner with his wife Alison Harris of Paris, Paris Tours which offers custom walking tours of Paris, Burgundy, Rome and the Italian Riviera.

(author photograph by Alison Harris, (c) 2014)

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University, a Professor of Economics at Boston University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and President of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company specializing in financial planning software. An active columnist, Professor Kotlikoff’s columns and blogs appear in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, Vox, The Economist, Yahoo.com, and the Huffington Post. Professor Kotlikoff received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1977.

From 1977 through 1983 he served on the faculties of economics of the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University. In 1981-82 Professor Kotlikoff was a Senior Economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Professor Kotlikoff is author or co-author of 16 books and hundreds of professional journal articles. His most recent books are The Clash of Generations (co-authored with Scott Burns, MIT Press), The Economic Consequences of the Vickers Commission (Civitas), Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (John Wiley & Sons), Spend ‘Til the End, (co-authored with Scott Burns, Simon & Schuster), The Healthcare Fix (MIT Press), and The Coming Generational Storm (co-authored with Scott Burns, MIT Press) and Generational Policy (MIT Press). Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security (co-authored with Philip Moeller and Paul Solman) will be published by Simon & Schuster in February 2015.

Professor Kotlikoff’s writings and research address financial reform, personal finance, taxes, Social Security, healthcare, deficits, generational accounting, pensions, saving, and insurance.

Professor Kotlikoff has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the Government of Russia, the Government of Ukraine, the Government of Bolivia, the Government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, AON Corp., and other major U.S. corporations.

He has provided expert testimony on numerous occasions to committees of Congress including the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee.

Rob Reid is a writer and technology entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, California.  He’s the author of YEAR ZERO (Random House/Del Rey, 2012) – a New York Times best-selling novel about aliens with a disastrously expensive weakness for American pop music.  In reviewing Year Zero, the Associated Press said, “Reid’s extreme imagination never wanes as he builds an entire universe,” while Wired’s Editor-in-Chief named it “my pick for best (and funniest) sci-fi book of the year.”  Amazon.com named YEAR ZERO one of the ten best Science Fiction and Fantasy books of 2012, as did Apple’s iBookstore.  The novel also finished sixth in the science fiction category from a field of (literally) thousands of qualifying titles in the annual Readers Choice Awards on GoodReads.

Rob’s essays, articles, and op-ed work have included pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, and a cover story for Wired magazine, in addition to pieces in innumerable highly trafficked websites and blogs.  He is also a widely cited speaker on issues connected to media, technology, and public policy.  A talk that he gave about copyright law from the main stage at TED’s flagship 2012 conference has been viewed millions of times across YouTube, the main TED site, and other video sites, and was the third most heavily-viewed talk from that conference on TED.com.  Rob has been interviewed about his writing and his viewpoints on nationally distributed NPR shows including On the Media, All Things Considered, West Coast Live, and LiveWire.

Rob has worked as an executive, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur in the technology world since 1994.  He was the sole founder, CEO, and Chairman of Listen.com, the online music company that developed the Rhapsody music service. Rhapsody was the world’s largest seller of online music until it was eclipsed (rather badly, he’ll admit) by Apple’s iTunes service.  Rob sold Listen and Rhapsody to RealNetworks. Viacom’s MTV Networks division later bought half of Rhapsody, and in March of 2010 it was spun out as an independent company. Rhapsody now has over a million paying subscribers.  Rob holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a BA and an MA from Stanford University, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Cairo Egypt.

He is currently working on his second novel, EMERGENT.

Domingo Martinez is the New York Times Best Selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 2012.  The Boy Kings of Texas is a Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award, a Non-Fiction Finalist for The Washington State Book Awards, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.

 The Boy Kings of Texas was recently “greenlit” for an HBO series through Salma Hayek’s production company, Ventana Rosa.

His work has appeared in Epiphany Literary Journal, Seattle Weekly, Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Saveur Magazine, Huisache Literary Magazine and he is a regular contributor to This American Life. He has also appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Diane Rehm show, and was the recipient of the Bernard De Voto Fellowship for Non-Fiction at Bread Loaf Writer’s Colony in 2013.  Mr. Martinez is also a fundraiser and spokesperson for 826 Seattle, the literacy project founded by Dave Eggers.

His new memoir, My Heart is a Drunken Compass, will be published by Globe Pequot Press in Fall 2014.

Dave Eggers has given this endorsement:

“Domingo Martinez is an essential new American voice, and  My Heart is a Drunken Compass delivers on the promise of The Boy Kings of Texas. In a life of chaos and pain he manages to find grace, and humor, and — contrary to the title of this book — real moral purpose. This is a riveting book.”

William Knoedelseder is a veteran journalist, best-selling author and television news executive who honed his investigative and narrative skills during 12 years as a staff writer at The Los Angeles Times, where his ground breaking coverage of the entertainment industry produced a long string of exposes. His two-year investigation of payola and other corrupt practices in the record business sparked five federal grand jury investigations across the country, led to the arrest and conviction of a score of organized figures, and formed the basis of his first best-selling book, Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business and the Mafia (Harper Collins). Stiffed was named Best Non-Fiction work of 1993 by Entertainment Weekly, which called it “the scariest book of the year…and the funniest.” Two of the book’s main characters—New Jersey crime boss Gaetano “Corky” Vastola and Roulette Records founder Morris Levy–later served as the models for HBO’s Tony Soprano and his music mogul advisor, Herman “Hesh” Rabkin.

In a subsequent 13-year television career, Knoedelseder served as the executive producer and creator of news programs and documentaries for Fox Television, Disney, Knight Ridder and USA Broadcasting. For six of those years, he worked closely with Barry Diller, first at Fox and then at USA, where, as Vice President of News, he created an innovative nightly news program in Miami called The Times, which The Miami Herald praised as “a daring blend of newsmagazine-style exploratory journalism with irreverence, humor, dollops of opinion and a wink-of-the-eye attitude.” Miami’s New Times named it “Best Newscast in South Florida.”

Knoedelseder also produced two nationally televised documentaries. Marilyn: Something’s Got to Give, a critically acclaimed two-hour special about the making Marilyn Monroe’s last unfinished film during the final few months of her life, set a primetime ratings record for Fox. All the Presidents’ Movies, a three-hour special for Bravo, examined the movie viewing habits of the modern U.S. Presidents—what they watched, when, with whom, and how it connected to world events—based on the never-before-seen private logs of the official White House movie projectionist from 1953 to 1986. Aired over three nights, the special was narrated by Martin Sheen.

Since 2000, Knoedelseder has written three more books. In Eddie’s Name (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) chronicles the brutal murder of a Philadelphia teenager that made national headlines when Knoedelseder, as executive producer of the Knight Ridder news program Inquirer News Tonight,pressured the city to make public the content of 911 tapes recorded the night of the killing, which ultimately revealed a complete breakdown of Philadelphia’s emergency response system. I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy’s Golden Era (Public Affairs/Perseus) recounts Knoedelseder’s time as cub reporter covering the L.A. comedy club scene when David Letterman, Jay Leno, Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman were young and undiscovered. Film/TV rights have been acquired by actor Jim Carrey and the project is in development as a TV series. Knoedelseder’s latest, Bitter Brew: the Rise and Fall of Anhueser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer, tells the riveting story of one of our nation’s most colorful and longest lasting business dynasties. Called “intoxicating reading,” by The Wall Street Journal, the book became a New York Times best seller and film rights were optioned by Lionsgate Television in association with Michael London, the Oscar-nominated producer of Sideways.

Knoedelseder is currently at work on his third book for Harper Collins, Fins, about the visionary car designer Harley Earl and his role in the phenomenal rise of General Motors.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific and contemplative studies of natural world. His book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking Penguin, 2012), was winner of the National Academies’ Best Book Award for 2013, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award, winner the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, and runner-up for the 2013 PEN E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A profile in The New York Times said of Haskell that he “thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist.” E.O. Wilson called Haskell’s work “…a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry in which the invisible appear, the small grow large, and the immense complexity and beauty of life are more clearly revealed.”

Haskell holds degrees from the University of Oxford and from Cornell University. He is Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South, where he served as Chair of Biology. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and was granted Elective Membership in the American Ornithologists’ Union in recognition of “significant contributions to ornithology.” His scientific research on animal ecology, evolution and conservation has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, among others. He has also served on the boards and advisory committees of local and regional land conservation groups.”

Haskell’s classes have received national attention for the innovative ways they combine science, contemplation, and action in the community. In 2009, the Carnegie and CASE Foundations named him Professor of the Year for Tennessee. The Oxford American featured him in 2011 as one of the southern U.S.’s most creative teachers, and his teaching has been profiled in USA Today, The Tennesseean, and other newspapers.

He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research on his new book THE SONGS OF TREES (to be published by Viking Penguin in April 2017),  a study of humanity’s varied roles within biological networks as heard through the acoustics of trees.

Ilyce Glink is an award-winning television and radio personality, a communications and media strategist, an innovator in content marketing and the founder of three Chicago-based companies.

She hosts a popular radio talk show for WSB-AM, is the “Good Cents” contributor to WGN radio, a nationally-syndicated columnist, a top blogger for CBSNews.com and Yahoo!, and a best-selling author. She also hosts the “Real Estate Minute,” a daily radio/web video series, “Big Money Real Estate” for WITNation.com, and is a frequent guest on NPR.

Ilyce is the author of over a dozen books, including the best-selling 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask and Buy, Close, Move In!, and she has nearly 1 million books in print. Her latest ebook/webinar offering is Intentional Investor: How to be Wildly Successful in Real Estate. She is the managing editor of the Equifax Finance Blog and the publisher of ThinkGlink.com, a site dedicated to helping consumers make the best decisions with their money.  Ilyce’s YouTube channel has over 5 million video views.

She was an on-air talent/producer for WGN-TV, hosted two syndicated radio programs, and has appeared on every major network’s morning news programs, Oprah, CNBC, CNN, and Fox Business.

More than 15 years ago, Glink started Think Glink Media, a digital communications agency that combines technology, creativity and experience to build online and offline connections through powerful communities, breakthrough native advertising, and first-person social engagement. The result is award-winning work, profitable campaigns and loyal customers. Her clients include Fortune 1000 companies in the financial services, real estate, and health industries as well as start-ups and nonprofits.

Glink has won numerous awards throughout her career, including Best Consumer Reporter, Best Magazine Report, Best Blog, and Best Television Report from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. She has won several top awards from the Society of Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), including Best in Business Blog. She also won the first Money $mart award from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and received two Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism from the Chicago Headline Club. In 2006, she was nominated for an Emmy® Award. She was co-founder of the Medicare Newsgroup, and part of the team that won the 2012 Web Marketing Association’s award for outstanding achievement in web development for MedicareNewsGroup.com.

Carlos was born in Havana in 1950. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, where he has served as chairman of the Department of Religious Studies and the Renaissance Studies Program.  Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, one of them in an office directly across from Einstein’s.  In 1962 he fled to the United States as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba through Operation Pedro Pan.  After living in several foster homes in the United States – including one for juvenile delinquents — he was reunited with his mother in 1965, but his father was never able to leave the island.  Working full-time jobs as he attended high school and college, he eventually earned entrance to the Graduate School at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D.  in 1979.

Eire is the author of Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press/Simon&Schuster, 2003), a memoir of the Cuban Revolution, which won the nonfiction National Book Award in 2003 and has been translated into thirteen languages.  He is also the author of several highly-acclaimed scholarly books on early modern European religious history, including War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory(Cambridge, 1995), and A Very Brief History of Eternity(Princeton, 2009).  In addition to serving on the publications committee of Yale University Press, he is an associate editor of the journal Church History, and was elected President of the American Society for Reformation Research in 2010.  All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state: a distinction he regards as the highest honor of all.  A second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, was published in 2010 (Free Press/ Simon & Schuster), and is currently being turned into a major feature film.  He is currently working on a biography of St. Teresa of Avila, to be published by Princeton University Press.

Carlos Eire can speak about five different areas, and has several talks ready to deliver within each area.

In 2001 Gail Collins became the first woman appointed editor of the New York Times‘ editorial page, and she resumed her twice weekly syndicated opinion column for the New York Times in 2007. Collins also writes for “The Conversation,” a Times blog in which she discusses political issues with David Brooks.

In her recent books, America’s Women and When Everything Changed, Collins offers insightful research and historical perspective, with characteristic wit and humanity.  In the New York Times Book Review, Amy Bloom praised When Everything Changed as a “smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women’s recent history” that provides the “best summary of American women’s social and political history that I’ve read.” Of her columns, New York Magazine finds that “in an age of outbursts, Collins has subverted the pundit’s rude role, performing what amounts to a sly soft-shoe over a rising wave of ideological bombast.”

A native of Cincinnati, Collins earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Marquette and a master’s in government at University of Massachusetts. Before joining The Times,  Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau (CSNB), which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics.