Carl T. Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, best known for co-creating the wildly popular 'Calling Bullshit' course and book with Jevin West. A theoretical evolutionary biologist by training, Bergstrom pivoted from studying how information flows through genomes to exposing how misinformation flows through society - developing the Eigenfactor journal-ranking system, writing textbooks on evolution, and most recently launching a free 18-lesson AI literacy course already adopted at 130 universities. Part scientist, part data detective, part corvid photographer, he is one of the most prominent voices arguing that skepticism is a civic virtue in a data-saturated world.
Emily Oster is a Harvard-trained economist, Brown University professor, and the mind behind ParentData - a platform transforming how millions of parents make decisions. With four consecutive New York Times bestsellers, TIME's 100 Most Influential People recognition, and over a million books sold, she wields data like a scalpel against pregnancy myths and parenting guilt, convincing readers that evidence beats anxiety every time.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, prolific author, and one of the most widely-read economic commentators in the world. After 24 years as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, he left in December 2024 to launch a daily Substack newsletter that quickly surpassed 569,000 subscribers. A Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center, Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. With 4.3 million Twitter followers, 27 books, and a career spanning academia, policy advising, and public journalism, he remains a defining voice at the intersection of economics and politics.
Roxane Gay is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, cultural critic, and publisher whose work sits at the intersection of feminism, race, and identity. Best known for 'Bad Feminist' and 'Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body', she holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University, writes opinion for the New York Times, runs the Substack newsletter 'The Audacity', and publishes underrepresented voices through her imprint Roxane Gay Books at Grove Atlantic. In 2025 she received the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, NYU Stern professor, five-time New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most outspoken voices in business and tech. Known for his unfiltered analysis of Big Tech, wealth inequality, and generational economics, he built and sold L2 Inc to Gartner for $155 million, co-hosts the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, writes the Webby Award-winning No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and reaches millions through his Prof G Pod. His books - from The Four to The Algebra of Wealth - have made him a trusted, provocative guide to navigating capitalism in the 21st century.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.