Marissa Rachel is a Brazilian American content creator and host from Los Angeles and the creator of her own wildly popular beauty, fashion, and lifestyle YouTube channel, @MarissaRachel. With over a quarter of a billion YouTube video views, and collectively over 2 million social media followers (from millennials through Gen Z), Marissa delivers a mix of fashion and beauty tips, martial arts content, and humorous skits for her audience.
Marissa hosted four seasons of a fashion competition TV show Ready, Set, Style which aired on the ITV2 Network in the United Kingdom. She has enjoyed partnerships with many of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Disney, Amazon, Twentieth Century Fox, Marvel, Victoria’s Secret Pink, Olay, Always & Tampax, Toyota, Office Depot, and Procter & Gamble. She has also spoken on the TEDx stage and at the United Nations General Assembly, USC School of Cinematic Arts, as well as numerous panels with Google and YouTube.
Douglas Raggio is experienced in nearly every aspect of the $150 billion specialty food industry. He is the founder of a thriving food company, Pass the Honey. He also founded the slow-cooked meal company, Stews & Such, cultivating a network of manufacturers, vendors, distributors, co-packers and retailers in/around the packaged food space.
Concurrently, he was the founder and managing director of early-stage venture capital fund Gastronome Ventures, one of the first fully-dedicated VCs in the healthier-for-you-food/beverage industry. He is the founder of the private equity fund Bias & Blinds Spots, also focused on emerging healthy food and beverage branded companies, with transactions currently totaling more than $150M.
He’s been an advisor to more than a hundred startups and is a sought-after speaker at North America’s largest specialty food trade shows. His tenure in the space has given him the opportunity to vet 12,000+ investment opportunities spanning more than a decade, including companies going from zero to multi-millions and those going in reverse to bankruptcy.
Previous to his work in the food and beverage industry, he managed $100M+ marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies including Nike, Motorola, DirecTV, and Discovery Channel. Douglas received a BS in Organizational Communication from Cal Poly Pomona.
Steven Raichlen is an author, journalist, lecturer, TV host, and the man who launched the barbecue revolution. He has hosted popular cooking shows like Planet Barbecue, Project Fire, Project Smoke, and Primal Grill. Steven has written 34 books, including the international blockbusters The Barbecue Bible and How to Grill, and the New York Times bestselling Planet Barbecue and Project Smoke. Raichlen’s books have won five James Beard Awards and three IACP Julia Child Awards, and have been translated into 17 languages. He is a member of the Barbecue Hall of Fame and Taste Awards Hall of Fame.
Also an award-winning journalist, Raichlen has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, GQ, and all the major food magazines. He has appeared on numerous major TV and radio shows in the US and abroad, from Oprah and The Today Show to Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Howard Stern. He also battled—and defeated—the Iron Chef in a Battle of the Barbecue Gods on Japanese television.
David Rakison is an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the development of cognition and perception in infancy as well as evolutionary developmental psychology. He has edited two books, Early Category and Concept Development: Making Sense of the Blooming Buzzing Confusion and Building Object Categories in Developmental Time.
Brad Willis a.k.a. Bhava Ram is a former NBC News war correspondent who reported from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond. He is the recipient of the prestigious Alfred I. duPont Award, considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for his work inside Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.
Self-healed from a broken back, failed surgery, and cancer, he is now devoted to teaching the sister sciences of Yoga and Ayurveda. He is the founder of Deep Yoga, based in San Diego, the author of two previous books, a spiritual musician, and leader of Mastery of Life trainings, retreats, and workshops in the United States and India.
John Ramos graduated from Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Following college, he was a journalist at the business magazine Across The Board, a publication of the business research and membership organization the Conference Board (www.conference-board.org/). He then moved into the financial markets, wherein he worked as an options trader for 10 years before becoming a film producer and aspiring screenwriter who resides in New York City. He also recaps “Veronica Mars” for the well-known Web site Television Without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com) under the handle “Couch Baron.”
Dr. Katherine Ramsland has done journalistic searches for the limit-experience inside the vampire and BDSM subculture. The bestselling author of forty-two nonfiction books, two novels, and over one thousand articles, she teaches psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania and writes a blog, Shadow Boxing, for Psychology Today.
Robert Rand is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who works in TV, print, and digital media. He began covering the Menendez brothers case for the Miami Herald the day after the killings on August 21, 1989. He was in court daily for both trials and provided analysis for Court TV, ABC, and CBS News. In March 1991, Playboy published Rand’s article “The Killing of Jose Menendez.” The 14,000-word story was the longest article ever published by Playboy. Rand’s print work includes stories contributed to People, The Guardian, Stern, Grazia, and Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald. He covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial for Paris Match.
In July 2016, Rand was hired by Wolf Films as a consultant working on the development of the NBC eight-hour limited series Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, which aired in the fall of 2017. Rand’s unpublished manuscript of The Menendez Murders provided the primary source material for the series.
Rand has appeared as the primary interview in dozens of documentaries about the Menendez case, including ABC 20/20‘s “Truth and Lies: The Menendez Brothers” and Dateline NBC‘s “Unthinkable: The Menendez Murders,” which both aired in 2017.
Rand was awarded a Los Angeles Emmy Award for two years of stories at KCOP-TV in L.A. about an illegal immigrant who was wrongly convicted. The stories resulted in the overturning of a ten-year-old conviction and the release of the man from jail. He was a member of the Special Assignment investigative reporting group at CBS 2 in L.A. and the I-Team at KYW TV (Philadelphia) that won a Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton Award for a year-long series about wealthy property tax dodgers.
Jim Rapoza was born and currently lives in Massachusetts. Over the years he has worked as a bike messenger, bar back, sports reporter, quality assurance engineer and guitarist in punk rock bands. Since 1993 Jim has worked as a technology reviewer and analyst for high-tech magazines PC Week and eWEEK. Jim Rapoza’s award-winning weekly column, “Tech Directions,” delves into all areas of technology and the challenges of managing and deploying technology today.
