You were listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and video clips of these lectures online at edcorner.standford.edu.

Please welcome today, David Rothkopf, who is the president and CEO of Gartner Rothkopf.

He has spent many years in this job focusing on green technology.

He was a managing director of Kissinger Associates and was also the senior trade officer of the Clinton administration. And he's been a very prolific writer.

His most recent book is Superclass, The Global Power Elite, and the World They Are Making.

Without further ado, and any more mistakes, here's David.

Thanks.

It's a pleasure to be here and to talk to you today.

I was looking over the list of speakers that you've got in this series, and I'm a bit of an

aberration from this group, because although I've been an entrepreneur my whole life and

I am, in fact, focusing on green technology in my day-to-day life, the subject of this book is a little bit off the beaten

path of what you're talking about, because it's about how the power structure of the world

works. And in specific, it's about the most powerful people on the planet, what they have in common,

how they're different from power elites of the past,

and how it's impacting our era. But, you know, I think I'll take a slightly different tack

than I normally do in talking about this, and I'll talk about it for a little bit of time,

and then we'll have some questions, and we can get into whatever is of specific interest to you.

But I was thinking as I was coming over here that many of you are people who deal with systems

design.

Others of you are people who deal with innovation more broadly.

Many of you are involved in pursuits where there are regular admonitions in a video that Tina just showed me

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