Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., O.P., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, Executive Editor of The Stream, Assistant Research Professor in the Busch School of Business and Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America.

Richards is author or editor of a dozen books including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012). He is also the author of Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; co-author of The Privileged Planet with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez; and co-author with Jonathan Witt of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that J.R.R. Tolkien Got and the West Forgot. His most recent books are The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in the Age of Smart Machines; Eat, Fast, Feast; and The Price of Panic

Richards’ articles and essays have been published in The Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The New York Post, Barron’s, Washington Post, Forbes, Fox News, National Review Online, The Hill, Investor’s Business Daily, Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Huffington Post, The Federalist, The American Spectator, The Daily Caller, The Imaginative Conservative and many other publications. His topics range from culture, economics, and public policy to natural science, technology, and the environment.

He is also creator and executive producer of several documentaries, including three that have appeared widely on PBS—The Call of the Entrepreneur, The Birth of Freedom, and The Privileged Planet.

Richards’ work has been covered in The New York Times (front page news, science news, and editorial), The Washington Post (news and editorial), The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Nature, Science, Astronomy, Physics Today, Reuters, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Enterprise, Congressional Quarterly Researcher, World, National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report, and American Spectator.

An experienced public speaker, Richards has appeared on several hundred radio and television programs, including Larry King Live (CNN), CBS Evening News, BBC, Huckabee, Dayside, Fox and Friends, Studio B with Shepard Smith (Fox News), Bloomberg TV, Glenn Beck TV, Yahoo Finance, Life Today, PBS, CBN, and TBN, The Michael Medved Show, The Mitch Albom Show, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Dennis Prager Show, Linda Chavez, The Mark Davis Show, The Bible Answer Man, Janet Parshall’s America, Al Kresta, Teresa Tomeo, Drew Mariani, Cardinal Dolan, and many others.

He has lectured at conferences as diverse as the Western Economic Association, South by Southwest, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Evangelical Theological Society; on dozens of college and university campuses around the world; at think tanks, including the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Acton Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the New America Foundation and the Heritage Foundation; at numerous public policy meetings, such as the Heritage Resource Bank, the Council for National Policy, and the Atlas Freedom Forum; in Christian forums such as Legatus, Knights of Malta, and Catholic Professionals; and on several occasions to members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. congressional staff.

In January 2008, his debate with the late Christopher Hitchens at Stanford University, moderated by Ben Stein and Michael Cromartie, was broadcast live to several hundred North American churches.

Richards has a Ph.D., with honors, in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He also has an M.Div. (Master of Divinity), a Th.M. (Master of Theology), and a B.A. with majors in Political Science and Religion. He lives with his family in the Washington, DC Metro area.

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievement in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How To Create A Mind, both New York Times best sellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His forthcoming book, The Singularity Is Nearer, will be released June 25, 2024. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.