The President of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson joined by Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money , Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google, and Nassim Taleb, scholar of randomness and risk and author of The Black Swan together will examine:

What will the American economic system look like in the months and years ahead?
Who are the innovators currently shaping the future?
What will be the role of business in that future?

About Nial Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His books include Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, and The War of the World. He has written and presented four highly successful television documentary series for British television: Empire, American Colossus, The War of the World, and, most recently, The Ascent of Money.

About Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, D.C. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of Time Magazine. He is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Kissinger: A Biography and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He was appointed after Hurricane Katrina to be the vice-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

About Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo. She holds a BS from Madras Christian College, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and a Master of Public and Private Management from Yale University.

About Eric Schmidt
Since joining Google in 2001, Eric Schmidt has helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global enterprise. Prior to joining Google, Eric was the Chairman and CEO of Novell and Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun's platform-independent programming technology. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

About Nassim Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a professor of risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute at New York University and he is a principal at Universa Investments. Taleb is also the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He is known for a multidisciplinary approach to the role of the high-impact rare event (the "Black Swan").

Tickets go on sale September 9th.

*Exclusive pre-sale to Friends of the NYPL from September 3rd