Todd Kashdan - Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively

Todd Kashdan - Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively

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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.

Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Intimate Portraits of Bob Marley - Basquiat

Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Intimate Portraits of Bob Marley - Basquiat

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Artist, Musician, Poet
Author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads

Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that.

Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

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Lead Author of Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics
Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important, then doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already, and we should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.

Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”

Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”

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Author of Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social & Political Imagination
Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation at University College London

The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.

ANDERS LEVERMANN

ANDERS LEVERMANN

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Professor at Physics Institute of Potsdam University
Senior Research Scientist at Earth Institute, Columbia University

A lot of people think climate change is about avoiding the extinction of mankind. In my opinion, climate change is about putting pressure on society and disrupting society to an extent that it can't function properly anymore. So my greatest fear is that if we don't combat climate change, the weather extremes will hit us with a frequency and intensity that we will not be able to recover after each impact. And then we will start to fight with each other.

NICK MEYNEN

NICK MEYNEN

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Senior Policy Officer Economic Transition at European Environmental Bureau
Author of Turning Point: The pandemic as an opportunity for change

Now with this crisis even the IMF, even the economists are saying we’re not going to go back to the neoliberal era. And they were defending this era for decades. So, I have hope that maybe we can now transition to something like a Wellbeing Era, where countries are already saying “we want to be a wellbeing economy. New Zealand is telling every ministry: Tell us how you are improving the wellbeing of the New Zealand people. So that means wellbeing has become the cop who rules over the others. There are countries like Bhutan who have thirty years of experience of doing that. They call it Gross National Happiness.

JENNIFER MORGAN

JENNIFER MORGAN

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Executive Director of Greenpeace International

I have always hoped and dreamt to work with young people because I’ve always felt that it is their future. It’s so inspiring to be working with young people all around the world. I feel that we are in the midst of transformational change and that working together around these key moments where you can see those shifts happening – unimaginable things that you never thought were going to happen can happen. That would be my other advice to young activists that just when you aren’t expecting it, something will happen and you’ll be like, “I can’t believe they just decided that! Holy cow!” And then you’ve got to celebrate.

ELIZABETH KARCHER

ELIZABETH KARCHER

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Executive Director of the President Wilson House in Washington, D.C.


I have three missions, topics of conversation, ideas for exhibitions and really discussions that we want to bring to life at the House, and those are stories of African-Americans, racial conflict, and social justice, as well as women and women’s stories, suffrage, and finally Wilson’s international legacy and how he was seen after the Great War. I think those three topics are topics that resonate today. So, even though they’re 100 years old and issues that he faced in his Presidency, these are topics that are still relevant. We’re still talking about social and racial justice. We’re still about women being enfranchised and women, not just in the vote, but having positions in Board of Directors, museums, companies, and corporations across the United States.

ROBERT AXELROD

ROBERT AXELROD

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Former Consultant for the UN, World Bank & US Department of Defense
Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Public Policy at University of Michigan
National Medal of Science Award-Winner

I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind this that has no grounding… And so I think what’s especially important in would be an educational in critical thinking.