Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. She’s known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity, in a way that’s accessible to a wide audience.

She’s the author of many books, including the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers Outer Order, Inner Calm, The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. She has an enormous readership, both in print and online, and her books have sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide, in more than thirty languages. (The Happiness Project spent two years on the bestseller list.)

On her top-ranking, award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, she discusses happiness and good habits with her sister Elizabeth Craft. Happier was named in iTunes’s lists of “Best Podcasts of 2015,” was named in the Academy of Podcasters “Best Podcasts of 2016,” and won a 2020 Webby Award for “best of the internet.”

She is a CBS News Contributor. Every Monday on CBS This Morning, the final “Before We Go” segment features her solutions and tips for living a happier, healthier, more productive life. She’s also a regular columnist for O The Oprah Magazine.

She’s been interviewed by Oprah, eaten dinner with Daniel Kahneman, walked arm-in-arm with the Dalai Lama, had her work written up in a medical journal, and been an answer on the game show Jeopardy!

In her work, she draws from cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, lessons from popular culture, and her own experiences to explore how we can make our lives happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative.

Gretchen Rubin started her career in law and was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she realized she wanted to be a writer. Raised in Kansas City, she lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Vex King is a young British Indian social influencer, mind coach, writer, and lifestyle entrepreneur. He owns the Bon Vita lifestyle brand, which brings empowering views, spiritual wisdom, practical solutions, inspirational stories, life lessons, and much more. His
goal is to help people transform themselves and their lives into something better.

King is a leading revolutioner for the upcoming generation of spiritual seekers. An online motivation to thousands of people, Vex is a role model for young people searching for a new way of living. Vex beat all the odds of a very hard childhood - his family were often homeless and he suffered racist abuse in a violent neighbourhood. Despite these hardships, Vex continued to finish university and thrive in his career. His work brought him into contact with people who began asking him for life advice and Vex started sharing his ideas through social media. His positive and encouraging posts very fast started to attract a very engaged followers who related to his messages and listened to Vex for guidance.

Ben Goldacre

Ben is a best-selling author, broadcaster, campaigner, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking the misuse of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, quacks, drug companies, and more.

His first book “Bad Science” (4th Estate) has sold over 500,000 copies to date, is published in 18 countries, and reached number one in the UK non-fiction bestseller charts. Bad Pharma, is on bad behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry and medicine more broadly: it is a top ten UK best seller. His Collected Journalism and Papers is the perfect toilet book for a nerd.

In policy work, he co-authored this influential Cabinet Office paper in 2012, advocating for randomised trials in government, and setting out mechanisms to drive this forwards. In 2013 he conducted an independent external review for the Department for Education, on improving the creation and use of evidence in the teaching sector (the public component of this work is published here). He is the co-founder of the AllTrials campaign – now supported by over 50,000 individuals, 120 patient groups, GSK, and all major academic and medical bodies in the UK – working towards a concrete fix for the ongoing problem of clinical trial results being withheld. He has given evidence on numerous occasions to multiple parliamentary select committees including the Public Accounts Committee (withheld clinical trials and Tamiflu),Science and Technology (withheld clinical trials, homeopathy), Health (privacy and electronic patient data), and Culture Media & Sport (libel).

Ben is currently a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Care in the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow in Epidemiology at LSHTM. He runs the EBMdataLab in the University of Oxford, building fun live tools to create and use data more effectively in healthcare and academia, like OpenPrescribing which has identified hundreds of millions of pounds of cost savings for the NHS, and OpenTrials, the missing index for all clinical trial data and documents. His work bio is here.

Ben wrote the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian for a decade. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, academic papers, government reports, lectures, radio shows, and more.

There are lots of clips of Ben on telly here, and a talk at TEDGlobal here. He has made various documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and The World Service on science, libel, policy, and epidemiology: The Placebo Effect is a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists is another. He’s appeared on the Today programme lots of times, QI, Any Questions, Newsnight, Start The Week, The Now Show, Loose Ends, PM, Quote Unquote, Watchdog, and various other things. In the US he’s been on shows such as On The Media and Radiolab. You can find plenty of this if you dig around on the site, along with lectures, podcast interviews, maybe start here.

He has toured theatres and rock venues and given over 300 talks in the past 5 years, from comedy clubs and music festivals to universities and schools, from various government departments to the Hammersmith Apollo, lecturing regularly to audiences of thousands.

He’s received lots of awards for writing, and a few honorary doctorates.