Here are ten bits of advice from an old guy, scientist and writer, who has always done what he liked and got well paid for it. Be lucky, competent, active, daring, cosmopolitan, flexible, generous, lucid, sharing, loving. I learned these rules from my wife and kids, not from my teachers.

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Annie Duke: A Columbia English major, then a doctoral researcher in psycholinguistics at Penn, Annie ditched academics to marry into romantic poverty. She took up poker to pay the mortgage. After winning $70k in her first month at the World Series of Poker, she moved to Vegas and became one of the winningest poker champions of all time. She now lives in L.A. and has four children.

This father-son duo (sometimes confused as brothers) views mathematics as art and vice versa. They often travel together, including a 4-year expedition when they lived in 10 different places (a far cry from Marty's life total of 40 home addresses), and have been known to heckle each other.

Maisie Crow is a documentary film director, cinematographer and photographer. She lives in Marfa, Texas with her husband and two dogs.

Her 2016 award-winning documentary, Jackson, is an intimate, first-of-its-kind look at reproductive health care through people in the Deep South who stand on both sides of the debate. Village Voice praised it as “elegant, unsettling” while New York Magazine said it “comes at a pivotal moment for reproductive rights”. The Last Clinic, a short-film and multimedia collaboration with The Atavist Magazine about Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2014.

Maisie has taught as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

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Dick Cavett has been nominated for eleven Emmys (most recently in 2012 for HBO’s Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again) and won three. Cavett’s television career has defined excellence in the interview format. He started at ABC in 1968 and also enjoyed success on USA, CNBC, and PBS, which aired Dick Cavett’s Watergate (2014) and Dick Cavett’s Vietnam (2015).  He has appeared in movies and plays on/off-Broadway, and his four acclaimed books include two collections of his New York Times opinion column: Talk Show (2010) and Brief Encounters (2014). 

Ed Catmull is a pioneer in computer graphics, Oscar winner and recipient of the John von Neumann award from the IEEE, Ed is the co-founder and president of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.  Starting with splines and Z-buffers, Ed was among Ivan Sutherland's legendary cadre of students: Fred Parke, Jim Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay.

NO OTHER INSTRUMENT is so victimized by stereotype as the organ, which the vast majority tend to associate with church, and probably with funerals, B movies, Halloween… And I think the organist’s image has really suffered. So I want to get in there and put on a show, because that’s what the organ is, after all. It’s a grandiose musical stage set, a glittering emotion-machine, and I see no reason not to have great deal of fun. The organ is musical dynamite, but its fuse must be lit.

Russell Brown is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems Incorporated, as well as an Emmy Award-winning instructor. His ability to bring together the worlds of design and software development is a heavenly match for Adobe’s creative products. 

In Russell’s thirty-three years of creative experience at Adobe, he has contributed to the evolution of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator with feature enhancements, and advanced scripts. Most recently he has begun to travel the world with a mobile phone camera and aerial drone to capture his adventures from wholly new creative perspectives. This new age of photography has propelled Russell in wonderful new directions.

Russell also specializes in inspirational hands-on training at Adobe MAX wherehe has shown users how to work — and play — with Adobe software. He has helped the world's leading photographers, publishers, art directors, and artists master the powerful tools that have made Adobe’s applications the standard by which all others are measured. He shares his delight in testing the limits of his tools as a prolific creator of an entertaining collection of Photoshop tips and tricks. His in-depth knowledge and zany presentation style has won him a cult following among all levels of Photoshop users.

"A live performance of the Russell Brown Show is not to be missed."

Mark Bittman, one of the country's best-known and widely admired food personalities, is known for his candor, his straightforward, no-nonsense style, and his simple recipes. He is the author of a dozen books, including How to Cook Everything - the bible of basic cooking for millions of Americans – and Food Matters, a discussion of sane eating. He is also the creator of the beloved New York Times cooking column "The Minimalist," now in its thirteenth year. 

Walter Alvarez's honeymoon and PhD thesis research was spent in the roadless desert of northernmost South America, living with Guajiro Indians and smugglers.  Later he worked for an oil company in Libya at the time of Gaddafi's revolution.  He's an archeological geologist, an expert in plate tectonics, and gained fame for proving that the Cretaceous mass extinction was caused by an asteroid that cratered massively in the Yucat?n Peninsula.