Not many people serve in an Administration for all eight years at a senior level. It’s exhausting, often daunting work. But, Cecilia Muñoz, New America’s Vice President for Public Interest Technology and Local Initiatives, did just that. First as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, then followed by five years as Director of the Domestic Policy Council. Before working in government, Cecilia was Senior Vice President at the National Council of La Raza (now UNIDOS US), the nation’s largest...

Fei-Fei Li’s life bridges two countries and two industries. She moved to the U.S. from China when she was 16 years old and just a few years later, graduated from Princeton with an undergraduate degree in physics. Fast forward to today, Dr. Li is the Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. But on her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017, Dr. Li served as Vice President at Google and as Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud. Her main research areas are in machine learning, computer...

Vincent Stanley is informally known as Patagonia’s chief storyteller. Day-to-day, he’s the company’s Director of Philosophy, where he works to ensure that the company’s culture remains true to its origins, while also adapting to and being resilient in the face of the challenges it faces today. As one of the original Patagonia employees, Vincent has seen the company through its most important transitions, particularly when it made the decision to be a pioneer in the retail space in thinking...

Judith Rodin began her career as a psychologist thinking about stress and coping mechanisms. She wanted to know why some people seem to do better with comparable stressors. This area of interest continued throughout her career when she later became the President of the University of Pennsylvania, and then the President of the Rockefeller Foundation; the first woman to hold both roles. In 2014, while at Rockefeller, she published a book called The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World...

The story of Darren Walker’s life is a quintessential American story. He was born to a single mother in a charity hospital, lived in a shotgun shack in a small, rural community in East Texas, attended public schools and colleges. Darren was in the first class of Head Start in 1965, received Pell Grants, and private scholarships. Today, as he put it himself recently in a commencement address at the University of Vermont: "I am black. I am gay. I live in Manhattan, that tiny island moored off...

In this age of anxiety that we’re living in, it’s arguably more important than ever that all of us learn to meet uncertainty head-on. As my next guest, Ama Marston, would say, “It’s imperative that we learn to deal with challenges not as a passing state, but as a condition of life.” Ama is a strategy and leadership consultant who’s worked with many Fortune 500 companies and the United Nations. She recently published a book called Type R: Transformative Resilience for Thriving in a Turbulent...

Ertharin Cousin has been called one of the world’s most powerful women, and rightly so. For five years, she was Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, the largest humanitarian agency in the world solving hunger. During her tenure, Ertharin oversaw a 15,000 person global staff who provided food to people in need in more than 70 countries. Her mission today remains the same: solving hunger in her lifetime. Ertharin is now a Lecturer at Stanford University and a...

Arianna Huffington helped to disrupt and reshape the newspaper business as we once knew it when she co-founded The Huffington Post. In its first week online in 2005, HuffPost had postings from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Larry David, Gary Hart, John Cusack, and Walter Cronkite. A little more than 10 years later, the site had become one of the most-visited news sites in the world. At that juncture, Arianna stepped down from the site to devote her time to a new startup of hers called Thrive Global...