Founder of Crowd Companies Jeremiah Owyang thinks that the sharing economy—though he prefers the term collaborative economy—could exceed PwC's projections of $335 billion in revenue by 2025. "There's really no question whether it's going to happen or not," Owyang said of the high rates of adoption of peer-to-peer platforms.

Michelle Miller, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Coworker.org, thinks that in the not-so distant future, work could mean long periods of short-term employment and short periods of having a single job. Coworker.org, which Miller describes as a digital platform for worker voices, facilitates networking and activism among workers at decentralized workplaces, from Starbucks baristas to Uber drivers.

Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase believes the status quo is broken, and that sharing economy platforms—which she refers to as "peers inc"—can help rebuild a new status quo. Chase devised the "peers inc" terminology because of the mutual importance of what she sees as two halves of the sharing economy equation: the platform and the peers.

Yerdle Co-Founder Adam Werbach has perhaps the broadest possible definition of the sharing economy. Werbach sees the sharing economy as not Silicon Valley-driven, but rather as an old way of doing things, one that encompasses any joint use of resources, from libraries to roads.

John Battelle is the perfect person to kick off the series What’s Now: San Francisco. John can not only tell the big-picture story of the Bay Area tech boom, but he also has new insights into one of the region’s key drivers of innovation - startups. His most recent startup is launching NewCo Shift, a new media brand covering the rise of NewCos and the biggest shift in business and society since the Industrial Revolution.

James Fallows - National Correspondent at The Atlantic | Joseph Cirincione - President of Ploughshares Fund | Heather Hurlburt - Director of New Models of Policy Change at New America | Christopher Fettweis - Author of "The Pathologies of Power: Fear, Honor, Glory, and Hubris in U.S. Foreign Policy". How worried should Americans actually be about the state of the world and how should we begin to rethink the appropriate scale of our investment in national security?

Orville Schell - Arthur Ross Director of the Center On US-China Relations at the Asia Society | Isabel Hilton - CEO & Editor of chinadialogue | Clay Stranger - Founding Project Manager for Reinventing Fire: China at the Rocky Mountain Institute | Barbara Finamore - Senior Attorney & Asia Director at Natural Resources Defense Council | Deborah Seligsohn - Environmental Governance Researcher at UC San Diego | Mark Clifford - Executive Director of Asia Business Council. Can U.S.-China cooperation in the clean energy sector lead the world in solving climate change and transform our relationship in the process?

Robert Johnson - President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking | Robert Hormats - Former Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy & the Environment | Pavlina Tcherneva - Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Economics at Bard College | Daniel Alpert - Founding Managing Partner of Westwood Capital, LLC | David Bank - CEO & Editor of ImpactAlpha. How can the U.S. government and private sector investors accelerate economic development in countries with high unemployment and rising violence?

Katrina vanden Heuvel - Editor & Publisher of The Nation | Lowell Bergman - Reva & David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Reporting at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism | Patrick Lawrence - Foreign Affairs Columnist at Salon & Contributing Commentator at The Fiscal Times | John Tirman - Executive Director & Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Center for International Studies. How can the U.S. media more effectively challenge the official D.C. narrative on national security, and why is this so important?

J. Stephen Morrison - Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies | Anne Schuchat - Principal Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention | Peter Hotez - Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine | Betsy McKay - Senior Writer, Global Health at The Wall Street Journal | Sylvain Aldighieri - Unit Chief of International Health Regulations/Epidemic Alert & Response in the Department of Communicable Diseases at Pan American Health Organization. How can the U.S. learn from the challenges posed by the Zika virus and lead the world in building a global health security infrastructure to stop future pandemics?