John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, has led the natural and organic grocer to a $15.7 billion Fortune 500 company with more than 460 stores and 87,000 team members in three countries. The company has been included on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list for 20 consecutive years.

Mackey has been recognized as one of Fortune's "World's 50 Greatest Leaders," Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year Overall Winner for the United States,” Institutional Investor’s “Best CEO in America,” Barron’s “World’s Best CEO,” MarketWatch’s “CEO of the Year,” Fortune’s “Businessperson of the Year,” and Esquire’s “Most Inspiring CEO.”

A strong believer in free market principles, Mackey co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement (http://consciouscapitalism.org/) and co-authored a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling book entitled “Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business” (Harvard Business Review Press 2013) to boldly defend and reimagine capitalism, and encourage a way of doing business that is grounded in ethical consciousness.

Vernon L. Smith, George L. Argyros Chair in Finance and Economics and President,
International Foundation for Research in Experimental economics

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002, for having established
laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of
alternative market mechanisms; has held appointments at Purdue University, Stanford, Brown, University of Massachusetts, USC, California Institute of Technology, U. of
Arizona, U. of Alaska-Anchorage, George Mason University, and Chapman University.
Professor Smith received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from California
Institute of Technology (1949), his masters in Economics from the University of Kansas
(1951), and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard (1955). He has authored or co-
authored over 300 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource
economics, experimental economics, the housing origins of economic instability, 1920-
2014, and in 2018, Humanomics, Cambridge press, with Bart Wilson.

Professor Smith is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. Purdue University awarded him an
Honorary Doctor of Management degree in 1989. He was elected member, National
Academy of Science, 1995. In 1996 he received Cal Tech's Distinguished Alumni Award.
He became Kansan of the year (Topeka Gazette) in 2002, received a Distinguished
Alumni award from the University of Kansas in 2011 and in 2014 an Honorary Doctor of
Science degree. He has served on numerous editorial and editorial advisory boards, and
as president of several national economic associations. He has served as a consultant on
the liberalization of electric power in Australia and New Zealand, and has participated in
numerous private and public discussions of energy privatization and liberalization in the
United States and around the world. In 1997 he served as a Blue Ribbon Panel Member,
North American Electric Reliability Council.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative  trader) before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.

Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has been translated into 39 languages.

In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 70 scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability.

Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering (only a quarter time position) [and, finance related bio only: scientific advisor for Universa Investments]. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder ("antifragile").

Taleb refuses all honors and anything that "turns knowledge into a spectator sport".