Hidden Forces with Demetri Kofinas

Eric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technological leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011, and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. He serves as chair of The Broad Institute, and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the co-author of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (Little, Brown and Company; November 2, 2021), with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously, he served as founding dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, the digital technology-oriented graduate school established by Cornell University in New York City. He has a mix of academic and industry experience: computer science faculty member at Cornell and MIT, researcher and manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and CTO of a fintech start-up. Currently, he serves as the chair of the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and as a member of the boards of Amazon and Corning.

Mohamed Aly El-Erian is an Egyptian-American economist and businessman. He is President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and chief economic adviser at Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO where he was CEO and co-chief investment officer (2007–2014). He was chair of President Obama’s Global Development Council(2012–17), and is a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Since 2014, he has been on the panel of experts that judged and selected the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year. He is also a regular contributor to “Project Syndicate”, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider as well as Fortune/CNN and Foreign Policy. Named for four years in a row as one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” he has written two New York Times Best Sellers, including, The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse published in January 2016 by Random House. Together with Sir Harvey McGrath, he co-chairs the capital campaign for Cambridge University. On July 1, 2019, El-Erian was appointed Senior Global Fellow at The Lauder Institute and Part-Time Professor of Practice at The Wharton School.

Shoshana Zuboff joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1981. One of the first tenured women at the school, she was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her career has been devoted to the study of the rise of the digital, its individual, organizational, and social consequences, and its relationship to the history and future of capitalism. She also founded and led the executive education program, Odyssey: School for the Second Half of Life. @shoshanazuboff

Ray Monk (born 15 February 1957) is a British philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he has taught since 1992. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for his biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. His interests lie in the philosophy of mathematics, the history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical aspects of biographical writing. His biography of Robert Oppenheimer was published in 2012. In 2015 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. @Raymodraco

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published six books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into nine different languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into twenty-four different languages; Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011), which has been translated into twelve different languages; and The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018) which has been translated into five different languages. He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like Foreign Affairs and the London Review of Books. Furthermore, he has written op-ed pieces for newspapers like the New York Times and the Financial Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, US policy towards India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, the folly of invading Iraq, the causes of the Ukrainian crisis, and the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Finally, Professor Mearsheimer holds a number of awards and honors. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. He was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. He received honorary doctorates from universities in China, Greece, and Romania; and in 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. His original business plan was simply “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. O’Reilly Media delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. Tim has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. In 1998, he organized the meeting where the term “open source software” was agreed on, and helped the business world understand its importance. In 2004, with the Web 2.0 Summit, he defined how “Web 2.0” represented not only the resurgence of the web after the dot com bust, but a new model for the computer industry, based on big data, collective intelligence, and the internet as a platform. In 2009, with his “Gov 2.0 Summit,” he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the Federal, State, and local level, and around the world. He has now turned his attention to implications of AI, the on-demand economy, and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world. This is the subject of his new book from Harper Business, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. In addition to his role at O’Reilly Media, Tim is a partner at early stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and on the boards of Maker Media (which was spun out from O’Reilly Media in 2012), Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. @TimOreilly

Ian Bremmer is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading global research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. Ian is also a frequent guest on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the BBC, Bloomberg, and many other television stations around the world. Ian has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism which examines the rise of populism across the world. He also serves as the foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for Time magazine. He currently teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and previously was a professor at New York University.