ARTHUR KLEBANOFF

ARTHUR KLEBANOFF

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President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency
Founder of Rodin Books & RosettaBooks

As President of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Arthur has represented J.D. Salinger, Arthur C. Clark, several U.S. Presidents, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Bradley, Paul Krugman, among others, and has handled books with over $1 billion in sales. In 2001, Klebanoff founded RosettaBooks, an independent eBook publisher which for twenty years disrupted the publishing business. Klebanoff has published, represented or packaged over 75 thought leadership titles. He founded RodinBooks to publish books by impactful leaders.

DEBORA CAHN

DEBORA CAHN

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Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell
Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl
Co-Producer The West Wing

So the idea was to look at what it's like to be an ambassador for the United States abroad and to do that in the context of a married couple, both of whom are in the same field. And what kind of tensions come from being in a relationship with somebody where you're both collaborators and personal partners and sometimes competitors? And what does that do to your life? What does it do to your work experience? And it felt like a military alliance and a marriage are not so different in many ways. You know, you get together under certain circumstances, and then time marches on and things change, and both parties change, and you're still in this relationship that either can or can't bend with you.

KARINA MANASHIL

KARINA MANASHIL

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President of Mad Solar · Creative Confidante & Industry Catalyst for Scott Mescudi a.k.a. Kid Cudi
Exec. Producer: Entergalactic starring Mescudi, Jessica Williams & Timothée Chalamet
Pearl · X starring Mia Goth

And what was so moving was when we went into Netflix to the theater to screen the finished product for the first time. You're sitting there and at the end of it, Scott was crying, and I looked over - it made me cry low-key - but Scott was crying and he said – This completely blows my mind because this is the first time I had a vision up here in my head and tried to express it, and then had to trust all 300 plus people, all around the world, working in different time zones, in different places, and each of them putting a hand to it and seeing exactly that vision. And then watching the product, and it is the best version of anything I could have ever possibly had in my head.
So, to us, that's the purest, most beautiful... Again, how fortunate that every hand was moving in tandem and moving in lockstep, and all of it. But that was the beauty of collaboration, this opportunity for a small vision to touch so many hands and become the big vision.

JF BROSSCHOT

JF BROSSCHOT

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Professor of Health Psychology on Psychophysiological Mechanisms of Stress in Daily Life · Leiden University

So social animals need to be connected. Lonely animals show chronic stress responses and die earlier if these needs are not met. Now, what are our concrete, non-negotiable needs? How many friends are enough to keep our default stress response down? Our social media needs, the need to talk, touch, and so on? And what physical spaces do we exactly need? How much nature do we need to be in? Stress science needs to stop studying stressors and focus on what we need to be healthy. Finally, this is not only health. It reduces our general performance, our cognitive flexibility, our creativity and exploration, our mood, and our libido.

HENRY SHUE

HENRY SHUE

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Author of The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now · Basic Rights
Senior Research Fellow · Centre for International Studies · University of Oxford

We can tell from the science that we have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. And common sense tells you that bringing them down for the second 50% is going to be harder than the first 50%. So we have to take care of the first 50% by about 2030, and it's 2023 already. We literally must - if we're going to keep climate change from becoming even more dangerous than it is - is to do a very great deal in the next seven or eight years. And a huge amount between now and 2050. So it's not that this problem is the most important of all possible problems. There are other problems like preventing nuclear war, but this is a problem that either we get a grip on it now, or there's a real possibility that it will escape from our control. 

CHRISTOPHER J. GERVAIS

CHRISTOPHER J. GERVAIS

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Founder & CEO of Wildlife Conservation Film Festival
Cannes Lions Award-winning Producer

There are hundreds of environmental film festivals, and that's not us. We are really the only pure Wildlife Conservation Film Festival. And we've elected to have these events in large urban areas simply because of the disconnect with nature. Whether we've had it in Beijing or San Paulo, or places in Europe, we find that the people living in these large urban areas are just not aware of the wildlife and the biodiversity around them. Most people in New York City have never been to the Catskills or the Adirondacks, which is just a short drive from Manhattan. And there you can see wildlife year round, all four seasons. And that's one of the purposes of the festival. Our mission is very straightforward and simple: to inform, engage, and inspire wildlife conservation through the power of film and media.

MICHAEL BEGLER

MICHAEL BEGLER

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Showrunner · Writer & Executive Producer
Perry Mason starring Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Shea Whigham, Hope Davis
The Knick starring Clive Owen · directed by Steven Soderbergh

Storytelling is our oldest art form. We can't silence the arts and those voices because if we do, we lose something that is so crucial to who we are just as human beings. We want to tell stories. We want to express things. For example, I cannot draw. And one day the teacher wanted us to do negative space drawings. And I said, "What is that?" And they explained that it's looking at what's around the object and not the object. And it clicked, and it made me look at things from a whole different perspective. And you know, what? That became where I was most successful. And so for me, there's are an infinite number of ways to tell a story that you never run out of ideas, that you can always find another road, another way to look at something. That's probably one of the key elements to my career.

PIA MANCINI

PIA MANCINI

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Co-founder & CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation
Alum of YC & Young Global Leaders at World Economic Forum

And so I think many of those challenges have to do with the nature of power and how power is conservative and power will do anything in order to stay in power. And the status quo will do anything and make itself look like anything that you want in order to stay in power. And they might change their spots a little bit here or there, but if you look deep enough, it's the same people. It's the same power.

And so for me, that was the big challenge of realizing that we were facing power and power is conservative, and that's not the way to really achieve the change that we wanted to make. I wasn't patient enough for incremental changes. That's not what I'm interested in. So there's one set of challenges that I think is common to anyone in my position trying to do this. With regards to being a young woman, I mean, sure you face the same kind of sexist comments that you would face anywhere else that I face now as a woman CEO. The best thing I can do for that is just occupying the space and keep occupying the space and refusing to move away or let things like that stop me from engaging.

LOVE - What is love?

LOVE - What is love?

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Filmmakers, poets, aviators, musicians, cave divers, environmentalists, writers, and artists explore what love means to them

DR GINDI

DR GINDI

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Sculptor

As a sculptor, I aspire to model the infinity of our existence – I know, that’s a very long perception and even longer effort. I am looking for the organic in our being and that shimmying state of infinite being. Likewise, I believe that human mankind should not be driven exclusively by momentary gratification but shall instead think about what lives on when our lives end. The shortcomings of capitalism are obvious – it is mostly based on self-interest and competition, and it is often anti-collaborative on the macro-level. As an artist, I recommend redesigning capitalism, to make it more socially oriented and inclusive. Markets need to grow for the benefit of all, obliged to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general and the environment in particular.

MATHIS WACKERNAGEL

MATHIS WACKERNAGEL

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Founder & President of Global Footprint Network
Winner of the World Sustainability Award · IAIA Global Environment Award

So shooting for one planet just means you would be totally dominant, and leave no space for other species. Ecologists say to maintain 85% of preindustrial biodiversity, it would take about at least half the planet left on its own. That would mean getting to half-planet. And now we use at least 1.75. I say at least because our assessments with about 15,000 data points per country in a year are based on UN statistics, and their demand side is probably an underestimate because not all demands are included. And also on the supply side or the regeneration side, the UN is very production oriented, so it's the FAO numbers, for example, look at agricultural production, and the depletion side or the destruction side is not factored in adequately. So that's why it's an underestimate. And still, it shows we use about 1.75 Earths, and that's more than three times half an Earth. So that's kind of the difference. But we also know overshoot will end one way or another. The question is do we choose to end it? Do we choose it by design, or do we let nature take the lead and end overshoot by disaster? So it's really ending overshoot by design or disaster. That's the big choice we need to make.

JOY GORMAN WETTELS

JOY GORMAN WETTELS

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Award-winning Executive Producer of UnPrisoned starring Kerry Washington & Delroy Lindo
13 Reasons Why · Home Before Dark · Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground
Founder of Joy Coalition

With UnPrisoned and with really my whole body of work as a producer, I'm really drawn to stories that make people feel seen that take issues that have stigma and shame attached to them, and making those issues just more palatable and more human. And few people realize that 50% of American families are touched by incarceration. And when you meet someone like Tracy McMillan, who really is a miracle, this is a woman who's now in her fifties who grew up in 22 different foster homes because her father was incarcerated when she was so little. And yet for all of his mistakes, the fact that he was a career criminal, he still, when he could change her diapers, he was present when he could be there. He braided her hair, and there was real love there. But they were separated not only by his mistakes, but by a system that is really unforgiving and really unfair, especially to black and brown men. So, the idea that we could tell a story where a young woman who was raised that way and by that person turns out to be Kerry Washington. You know, turns out to be somebody who you want to be, turns out to be "Olivia Pope", this woman that we all see as so beautiful and such a hero and so strong and so powerful, I felt was just an incredible opportunity. And when we first put Tracy and Kerry in the same room, Kerry said to Tracy, "You know you're a miracle, right?"

ARMOND COHEN

ARMOND COHEN

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Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force

There's no such thing as completely clean energy. We use that term a lot, but it's not really true. We have low carbon energy, and lower carbon energy, but any kind of industrial system has requirements for materials and processing, and nothing is completely natural in the industrial world. If we can electrify transportation, I think we can clean up the grid, and then I think we can deal with these life cycle issues in a way that's responsible, but it'll never be zero. That's impossible. The good thing about technology is it can move very fast. And so my advice would be if you're interested in this topic, if you have a mathematical, scientific, or business orientation, or you just like solving problems, get trained to really be part of the technological business revolution that's going on right now.

TODD B. KASHDAN

TODD B. KASHDAN

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APA Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively
Curious? · The Upside of Your Dark Side
Leading Authority on Well-being, Curiosity, Courage & Resilience

We're really talking about principled rebels. And when we talk about insubordination, we're talking about most of us live in these social hierarchies, and there's the idea, this started in the military and still goes on, where if someone at a lower rank questions or challenges a command or a norm that someone of a higher rank, that's considered an act of insubordination. And one of the main problems of that, I think anyone who's listening can acknowledge, is it depends on the quality of the idea of the person who's raising the question. I just realized there was this whole body of literature on minority influence that no one had put together into a book for the general public, and considering the racial reckoning that occurred during COVID-19, the extra attention to diversity, to disadvantaged groups, every moment of society, it just feels like it's more and more relevant of what I've been working on.

LISA JACKSON PULVER

LISA JACKSON PULVER

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Deputy Vice-Chancellor University of Sydney's Indigenous Strategy & Services

We come from the land, and we go back to the land. Aboriginal people have been on this land for at least 60,000 years in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth and survived. And over the last 230 years, the most catastrophic events have occurred to this land because people didn't listen to ancient Aboriginal cultures and knowledge. So my question is, if people were able to look after this place for 60,000 years and thrive, what have we done to ensure that we have a healthy fit world for the next 60,000 years?

AMANDA E. MACHADO

AMANDA E. MACHADO

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Writer, Public Speaker, Facilitator · Founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing

So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, I think looking at that, really deeply thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.

HAROLD P. SJURSEN

HAROLD P. SJURSEN

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Professor of Philosophy focusing on Science, Technological Ethics, Engineering & the Arts

I have a granddaughter who's just going into high school, and she is filled with idealistic thoughts and is optimistic. She's a person who is both in love with art and in love with science. She's vivacious and just everything about her seems like life is beautiful, and “I'm going to be able to do this and that.” And, of course, when I talk to her, I do everything I can to encourage this kind of openness and optimism, and belief in herself and her ability to do worthwhile things. And not be too concerned about is she going to be able to have a job with enough income to be where she wants to be. And so it’s how to perpetuate and strengthen that kind of spirit and hope, that it can be validated by giving this generation the opportunity to do things. Because I believe that if she and people who think and feel like her were really given the opportunity to be influential and to do things that would have a tremendous shift in the way the world is going. She doesn't think in terms of quarterly profits. She thinks in terms of human happiness and human good, human fairness, and the beauty of nature. I think we need to do. I think the universities can play a part. Schools play a part, but there has to be a broader general sense that this is how we should conceive the future. And, you know, galleries, podcasts, books, newspapers, universities, schools, every kind of institution needs to offer something to help this.

MAGGIE GROUT

MAGGIE GROUT

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Founder & CEO of Thinking Huts: tackling the Global Education Crisis with 3D Printing

I think being a young Asian woman and trying to lead people can be difficult in the sense that they have those assumptions in place. I do think the typical archetype of Asian women is that you're supposed to be quiet. And maybe those aren't going to be perceived leadership qualities, but in terms of what I have done to overcome that, I've really focused on building the trust and showing people that I genuinely care about them and valuing long-term relationships, especially on the business side. So with the construction team, just showing them that I'll stand up for them if I see behavior that's not okay in my perception. And just being a good person with ethics, I think is maybe what sets me apart because then people respect that and they'll follow you.

TANSY E. HOSKINS

TANSY E. HOSKINS

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Author of The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion · Foot Work · Stitched Up
Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

I definitely believe at the moment that fashion brands, big fashion in particular, they just exist to exploit people. It's an excuse to exploit the poor, basically. I see fashion as part of this very extractive global economic society where 100, 150 years ago, that extraction was very obvious. You had the enslavement of people. You had taxation. You had literally armies turning up and occupying the land that they wanted and just taking resources or land. These days it's more subtle, but the brands are still following those colonial pathways.

JOSH KAMPEL

JOSH KAMPEL

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CEO of Clarim Media

Think about how do they deliver value to all of those constituents rather than just their shareholders. So they will create the more successful long-term companies, especially generationally, as Gen X and millennials care more and more about mission and purpose. This idea of greenwashing or now what we can call woke-washing and that ESG goals are typically held within PR groups, within companies. They just talk about what they're doing versus being held accountable. I think we will continue to see that paradigm shift towards accountability, transparency of companies doing the right thing.