Jesse Ventura is an American statesman, actor, author, and former professional wrestler who served as the 38th Governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003. Ventura served as a Navy UDT-Seal during the Vietnam War and later embarked on an 11-year professional wrestling career taking up the stage name Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He had a long tenure in the World Wrestling Federation as a performer and color commentator, and was inducted into the company's Hall of Fame in 2004. After leaving wrestling, he began a successful film career, appearing in films such as 1987's hit Predator, starring alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. He served as Mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota from 1991 to 1995, before running as the Reform Party candidate in the Minnesota gubernatorial election of 1998. After leaving office, Ventura became a visiting fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and has also hosted a number of TV shows and has written several political books, including his new release DemCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans: No More Gangs in Government.

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Karl Eikenberry was the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty. Before that, he had a 35 year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General. His military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005-2007. He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China. He is currently a Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

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Alberto Gonzales was the 80th Attorney General of the United States, having been appointed to the post by President George W. Bush in February 2005. He was the first Hispanic to hold that position and is the highest-ranking Hispanic government official ever. In addition, he is the only lawyer in the nation’s history to serve as both the White House Counsel and Attorney General. He is widely considered a key architect of the War on Terror and has been very outspoken on such issues as immigration, the rights of children and fighting against sexual predators. He also served as George W. Bush’s General Counsel while he was Governor of Texas, and subsequently as Secretary of State of Texas, and as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court. He is currently the Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law at Belmont University, in Nashville, and has also recently joined the law firm of Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis.

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Bob Woodruff is an award-winning broadcast journalist for ABC News. He has covered major stories throughout the country and around the world, and was named co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight in December 2005. On January 29, 2006, he was seriously injured by a roadside bomb that struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq. Just 13 months after being wounded, he returned to ABC News with his first on-air report, To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports. This prime time documentary chronicled his traumatic brain injury, painstaking recovery, and the plight of thousands of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with similar injuries. He continues to cover this topic and was honored with a Peabody Award in 2008 for his reporting on the subject. In February 2007, Woodruff and his wife Lee published the best-selling memoir In An Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing, chronicling his injuries in Iraq and how their family persevered through a time of intense trauma and uncertainty. They also established the Bob Woodruff Foundation to help heal the physical and hidden wounds of war by providing resources and support to injured service members, veterans and their families. In July 2008, Woodruff began anchoring Focus Earth, a weekly eco-newscast for Planet Green, Discovery Communications’ 24/7 eco-lifestyle network.

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Peter Diamond is a Nobel Prize winning economist and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. He has written on public finance, social insurance, behavioral economics, uncertainty and search theories, and macroeconomics. His books include Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (with Peter R. Orszag), Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices and Pension Reform: A Short Guide (both with Nicholas Barr), and Behavioral Economics and Its Applications (edited with Hannu Vartiainen). His recent report is Pension Reform in China: Issues, Options and Recommendations (with Nicholas Barr). He has been President of the American Economic Association, of the Econometric Society, and of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He was one of the three winners of the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

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Josef Avesar, an Israeli-born attorney who resides in Southern California, is president of the founding committee of the Israeli Palestinian Confederation. He has conducted numerous symposia on the concept of a confederation between Israelis and Palestinians and has hosted political and civic leaders from around the world in discussions of confederation as a means of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peace is his first political book.

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Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She is the author of two books on international affairs, and as of January 2011, she is most noted for her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which is a comic memoir that ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting techniques

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With more than two decades of political and private sector consulting experience in the US and around the globe, Alex has developed communications strategies and campaigns for Fortune 100 Companies, served as media consultant to five U.S. presidential campaigns, helped elect eight U.S. senators and six governors. Fortune Magazine singled out Castellanos as a “new-style media master.” In 2007, GQ Magazine called Castellanos one of the 50 Most Influential People in D.C. Castellanos brings a wealth of campaign strategy, public opinion research and communications experience to corporate and public policy campaigns. He is a member of CNN’s “Best Political Team on Television," and appears regularly on NBC's Meet the Press and numerous other television public affairs programs.