Crisis & Chaos 2023 Archive

Elbridge Colby is co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, a policy initiative focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021), which The Wall Street Journal selected as one of the top ten books of 2021.

George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.

Dr. Friedman is a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.



His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media.

For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

Former US Presidential Advisor Former Advisor to the UK Cabinet Best-Selling, Award-Winning Author Tech Entrepreneur Dr. Malmgren is an economist who makes sense of the world economy by writing books, by founding tech businesses, by advising policymakers around the world and through public speaking and teaching. She lectures at Sandhurst and in the Duke Fuqua Global Executive MBA Program. She is a Senior Advisor to The Monaco Foundry, a European start-up incubator for impact-led founders. She is a member of the Advisory Board at Streamline Media, the firm that built many of the most successful video, digital and VR games in modern history. She has been named a Fellow of The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation for 2022-2024. She is also a Founder member of the Lunar University, a NASA-originated project to ensure the first human institution on the moon represents the arts and humanities. She writes a column about the world economy on Substack and is currently pursuing the MIT New Space Economy Program: Technologies, Products, Services, and Business Models.

She served President George W. Bush in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and on The National Economic Council. She served on the President’s Working Group on Corporate Governance and The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. After 9/11 she was also responsible for assessing Terrorism Risks to the Economy and technology as a source of geopolitical competitiveness. Before joining the White House, she ran the Bankers Trust Asset Management business in Asia and was then appointed as the Global Chief Currency Strategist. She was then named the Deputy Head of Global Strategy at UBS. More recently she advised the British Cabinet on trade issues as a Board Member for The Department for International Trade from 2017-2019. She is also on the Board of Premios Verdes which holds the “Green Oscars” to support cleantech start-ups in emerging markets and serves as a judge on The Queen’s Enterprise Business Awards and is a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI, the world’s leading defence think tank. She has also been involved in the Planning Committee of the BSA Huxley Summit. In 2014, she co-founded a robotics firm that made industrial drones which won the Cog X Award for Autonomy, the 2020 National Technology Award and Power Product of the Year 2020.

Her most recent bestseller, The Infinite Leader, won the International Press Award for the Best Book on Leadership for 2021. Her previous book, The Leadership Lab, was named Business Book of the Year and Best Book on Leadership in 2019 and won the International Press Award 2020 and the NYC Library Big Apple Award. She is also the author of: Geopolitics for Investors (2015) and Signals: How Everyday Signs Help Us Navigate the World’s Turbulent Economy a crowd-funded Amazon best-seller (2016/7). She was named one of the Fifty Top Inspiring Women in the UK and one of the Top 100 in Tech by @WATC_WeAreTech and longlisted by Computer Weekly as a Most Influential Women in Tech for 2019, 2020 and 2021.

She has a BA from Mount Vernon College and an M.Sc. and PhD from LSE. She completed the Harvard Program on National Security. She gave the graduation address at the London School of Economics in 2013 and 2016. Commercial firms like Google, Rolls Royce, American Express, major banks and asset managers like Citigroup and State Street, governments and military leaders retain her to speak.

Erik D. Prince is a US-born entrepreneur, philanthropist, Navy SEAL veteran and private equity investor with business interests in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. A strong supporter of economic development in emerging markets, he is the founder and chairman of Frontier Resource Group, a private equity firm that invests in transformative natural resource projects. Prior to establishing the Frontier Group of companies, Mr. Prince founded and ultimately sold Blackwater USA, a provider of global security, training and logistics solutions to the US Government and others, which he sold in 2010 and Presidential Airways, a global transportation company with over 70 aircraft operating in emerging markets. Mr. Prince is married and between himself and his wife Stacy enjoy raising 12 children. He was educated at Hillsdale College in Michigan and upon graduation joined the US Navy, where he served as a Navy SEAL officer until 1996. Mr. Prince’s philanthropic endeavors are focused on refugees, humanitarian relief and economic development. Mr. Prince’s career of extensive professional engagements throughout the world give him a unique perspective on developing economic trends, opportunities and risks to consider.

Marin Katusa is a New York Times best selling author. His most recent book, The Rise of America, was a Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, #1 in total sales in the US per Bookscan, #1 on Amazon (all categories), and is a USA Today bestseller.

Marin is the co-chair and CIO of Carbon Royalty Corp.

Katusa has visited over 500 resource projects in over 100 countries, and his insights have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, and other outlets.

Visit www.katusaresearch.com for his research and thought pieces.

David P. Goldman is president of Macrostrategy LLC, a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty, and a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He writes the "Spengler" column for Asia Times Online and the "Spengler" blog at PJ Media, and is the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-Form the World (Bombardier Books) and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too)(Regnery).

David Murrin began his unique career in the oil exploration business amongst the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the southwestern Pacific islands. There, he engaged with the numerous tribes of the Sepik River, exploring the mineral composition of the region. Before the age of adventure tourism, this region was highly dangerous, very uncertain and local indigenous groups were often hostile and cannibalistic. David's work with the PNG tribespeople catalyzed his theories on collective human behaviour.

In the early 1980s, David embarked on a new career, joining JP Morgan in London. Watching his colleges on the trading floors, he quickly identified modern society also behaved collectively. He was sent to New York on JPM’s highly rated internal MBA equivalent finance programme. Once back in London, he traded FX, bonds, equities and commodities on JPM’s first European Prop desk. In 1991, he founded and managed JPM’s highly successful European Market Analysis Group, developing new behavioural investment techniques which were utilized to deploy and manage risk at the highest level of the bank.

In 1993, David founded his first hedge fund, Apollo Asset Management, and, in 1997, co-founded Emergent Asset Management as CIO. His primary role was overseeing trading across all fund products as well as being particularly active in the firm’s private equity business. He co-founded Emvest, Emergent’s African land fund, in 2008 and acted as its Chairman until its sale from the group in 2011. In addition, through Emergent’s Advisory Business, David was responsible for the critical fund-raising for Heritage Oil, allowing it to expand significantly by investing in its Uganda exploration programme. He took full control of Emergent in 2011, combining his management of the Geomacro fund with the role of Chief Executive Officer until 2014.

David has been described as a polymath and his career of more than three decades has been focused on finding and understanding collective human behavioural patterns including deep-seated ‘patterns’ in history and Dyslexic Strategic Thinking (https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/article/dyslexic-strategic-thinking). Then using them to try and predict the future for geopolitics and markets in today’s turbulent times. He has a remarkable track record.

David’s advisory and future trends speaking (/future-trends-speaker) is based on his direct investment experience combined with a framework that can be used to explain and qualify decisions within an investment team, aid risk assessment and reduce biases in collective investment decisions.

Since his early thirties David has owned and raced the famous classic racing yacht Cetewayo (https://www.zuluyachting.com/) . The vessel is occasionally used as part of senior management team strategy days as part of David's leadership programme (/aspirations/leadership) . David is a keen racing and classic yachtsman, co-founding the British Classic Yacht Club in 2002 which has grown over the past decade into a substantial organisation. He was the Vice Commodore and then Commodore of the Club, resigning in 2019. Visit Zulu Yachting (https://zuluyachting.com/) for more information.

In the desire to share his observations and predictive constructs, David has written four books.

Breaking The Code Of History (https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/breaking-the-code-of-history) recognised that post 9/11, the world changed in an instant. Using his theories of human social structures, David was able to successfully predict back in 2007 the key process in human social structures that have impacted today’s changing world, including the decline of America and the West and the rise of China, and the reality of climate change.

His second book, released in 2018, is Lions Led By Lions (https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/b ook/lions-led-by-lions) which examines Britain’s misunderstood involvement in the First World War and the achieved learning curve of its Army's leadership that resulted in a war-winning British Expeditionary Force rolling back the German Army in 1918. The story provides clear lessons that should be applied by today's leaders concerning the deterrence of global conflict.

David's third book is a call to arms, in which his Now or Never UK Defense Review (https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/book/now-or-never) highlights the clear and present threats faced by Britain in the years and decade ahead from Russia and especially China, and the urgency for the need for large-scale rearmament to secure the future peace.

David's latest book Red Lightning (https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/book/red-lightning) integrates fact and fiction and describes from a future perspective how China wins WWIII in 2025. It is a sober warning to the leaders of the Western world that peace will only be maintained by a hard-won deterrence of aggression.

Samuel Rines is the managing director of CORBŪ, a research intelligence and advisory platform at the intersection of markets, policy, and national security. Based in CORBŪ’s Houston, Texas, office, Samuel is a global macro expert focused on the investment implications of politics and policy. His PolyMacro research and model portfolios are widely followed by both large family offices and institutional investors.

Prior to joining CORBŪ, Samuel was the chief economist and investment strategist at Avalon Advisors, where he directed the global investment outlook across all asset classes. Before joining Avalon, Samuel was the portfolio manager at Chilton Capital Management, where he launched the Chilton ESG Equity Strategy and a long/short technology portfolio. Samuel started his career as the cross-asset analyst for a small hedge fund.

Jacob Shapiro is a speaker, consultant, author, and researcher covering global politics and affairs, economics, markets, technology, history, and culture. He speaks to audiences of all sizes around the world, helps global multinationals make strategic decisions about political risks and opportunities, and works directly with investors to grow and protect their assets in today’s volatile global environment. His insights help audiences across industries like finance, agriculture, and energy make sense of the world.

He is a partner and the director of geopolitical analysis at Cognitive Investments, a registered investment adviser offering wealth management services to individuals, family offices, and institutional investors. He is also the chief strategist at Perch Perspectives, a business and political risk consulting firm that works closely with Cognitive Investments to provide corporate executives with custom advisory services and bespoke analysis.

Jacob hosts the podcast series “Cognitive Dissidents,” which features interviews with subject matter experts in geopolitics, technology, markets, agriculture, economics, and other fields.

Prior to his work with Cognitive Investments and Perch Perspectives, Jacob was a geopolitical analyst at Stratfor and Geopolitical Futures.

He holds a master’s degree with distinction from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern studies from Cornell University. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter. When he’s not tweeting at 4 a.m. about the latest international developments or commodities prices, you might find him on a continuing mission to find the world’s best cheeseburger, dragging his family to Civil War battle sites, or doing his best Larry Bird impersonation at a pickup basketball game.

Worth Wray is a global macro/geopolitical analyst and venture investor who is always searching for exceptional founders and compelling macro themes. A voracious reader and open-source analyst, Worth’s process involves a multidisciplinary study of current events, trends, cycles, shocks, and narratives in the context of history. Worth is fascinated by the people, businesses, industries, technologies, political/geopolitical systems, and other macro forces which shape human civilization. He is also highly focused on the vast range of competitive and warfighting domains in which nation-states, organizations, and super-powered individuals compete.

Alongside a variety of partners, including global macro investor Mark Hart, Worth personally invests in early-stage technology companies with an emphasis on “quantum leap” opportunities he believes can reinforce or remake key pillars of American power. Worth spends much of his time sharing his macro thinking with the founders and management teams of his portfolio companies and formally serves as a board observer to the world’s first and only “Parallel Reality” display company, Misapplied Sciences, Inc.

Previously, Worth spent almost 15 years in investment, research, and publishing roles, and his ideas have been featured on popular media platforms including CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider, MarketWatch, Real Vision, and Mauldin Economics.

Worth’s previous roles include working as a partner and macro/geopolitical analyst at Corriente Advisors from 2016 to early 2023; chief economist for two large wealth management firms (Evergreen GaveKal and STA Wealth Advisors) from 2015 to 2016; chief strategist to investment writer John Mauldin from 2013 to 2015; and product specialist and portfolio strategist for Salient Partners (which ran an endowment-style fund of funds with Morgan Creek Capital Management) from 2009 to 2013. He also received a "special thanks" credit for reviewing and commenting on the screenplay of 'Money Monster', a 2016 film directed by Jodie Foster.

Worth earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Louisiana State University in 2008 and lives with his family in Fort Worth, Texas.

Jay Martin is the host of the Jay Martin Show, a talk show that sits at the intersection of geopolitics and macro-finance. He has interviewed many of the world's top money managers, economists, and leaders of G7 Nations. He is also the host of the VRIC, one of the world's largest commodity investment conferences.

Jonathan Roth has extensive experience as a journalist, producer and executive at major Canadian television corporations such as Bell Media (CTV, Travel + Escape, Discovery Channel), Rogers Media (OMNI Television, The Biography Channel) and S-Vox (Vision TV, Joytv 10, ONE). Since 2012 his work has focused on finance and geopolitics, working with clients such as Mauldin Economics and Geopolitical Futures.

Roth won a Gemini Award (Canada’s equivalent of an Emmy Award) for an interview he produced for CTV with Canadian Lt. General Roméo Dallaire that covered the general’s recollection of events during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In 2006 he was the first Western-based journalist to interview Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe after over four years of a self-imposed information blackout by the African dictator. In total, Roth has hosted or produced hundreds of interviews with figures ranging from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Mexican President Vicente Fox and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich to Mossad director Efraim Halevy, billionaire film and mining magnate Frank Giustra and Bank for International Settlements Economic Adviser, William White.

Roth is also a documentary director, most recently directing two films dealing with China. China On Top: How China Is Using America’s Playbook To Take Over The World is a one-hour documentary exploring how China could become the globe’s economic and geopolitical leader. It features Michael Pillsbury, the former Reagan and Bush-era Pentagon official President Donald Trump described as, “probably the leading authority on China.” China on the Edge: Challenges & Opportunities in the Middle Kingdom is a 25-minute mini-documentary highlighting China’s incredible growth and the myriad of questions this raises for investors worldwide. Produced for Mauldin Economics, the film features top China hands, including Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer, Stratfor/Geopolitical Future’s George Friedman, GaveKal’s Louis Gave and Michael Pettis from Peking University.

Roth’s work has taken him all over the world, to nearly 40 countries spread throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. A Canadian citizen, he has been recognized by U.S. Citizenship & Immigration as a producer of “extraordinary ability” and is legally entitled to work anywhere in the United States. Roth is also a registered composer with SOCAN and his music compositions have been used in television broadcasts across Canada. He is a graduate of the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s Broadcast Communications Program and also studied economics at The Fraser Institute while beginning his post-secondary studies at Trinity Western University.

Roth makes his home in the mountains with his wife and three sons near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Wesley K. Clark is a businessman, educator, writer and commentator who serves as Chairman and CEO of Wesley K. Clark & Associates, a strategic consulting firm. Clark retired as a four star general after 38 years in the United States Army, having served in his last assignments as Commander of US Southern Command and then as Commander of US European Command/ Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He graduated first in his class at West Point and completed degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University (B.A. and M.A.) as a Rhodes scholar. He worked with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in the Dayton Peace Process, where he helped write and negotiate significant portions of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement.

In his final assignment as Supreme Allied Commander Europe he led NATO forces to victory in Operation Allied Force, a 78-day air campaign, backed by ground invasion planning and a diplomatic process, saving 1.5 million Albanians from ethnic cleansing. His awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Defense Distinguished Service Medal (five awards), Silver star, bronze star, and purple heart. 

Clark was a candidate for the 2004 Democratic Party nomination for President. He won the Oklahoma state primary before withdrawing to endorse the eventual Democratic nominee, John Kerry.

In 2019, he founded Renew America Together, a nonprofit organization designed to promote and achieve greater common ground in America by reducing partisan division and gridlock.

Chris Macintosh is a proven professional trader and money manager whose expertise is sought out by family offices and high net worth individual investors around the world. Throughout his career, Chris has founded and built several multi-million dollar businesses in the investment arena including overseeing the deployment of over $35 million into Venture Capital opportunities and advising family offices internationally. Additionally, Chris founded and sold a real estate investment firm and worked in early-stage investment capital. He now manages money for clients of Glenorchy capital; a macro focused hedge fund, and is the founder and CEO of Capitalist Exploits, with its flagship investment subscription letter called Insider. Prior to this, Chris built a career at Invesco Asset Management, Lehman Brothers, JPMChase, & Robert Flemings. Raised in Southern Africa, Chris has since lived & invested from 7 different countries. 

Jared Dillian is the editor of The Daily Dirtnap, a daily market newsletter for investment professionals, continuously published since 2008. He graduated from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1996 with a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science, from the University of San Francisco in 2001 with a Masters in Business Administration, concentration in Finance, and from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2023 with a Masters in Fine Arts in Writing. Jared worked for a small floor market maker on the Pacific Options Exchange from 1999-2000, and was a trader for Lehman Brothers from 2001 to 2008, specializing in index arbitrage and ETF trading. He is also the author of STREET FREAK: Money And Madness At Lehman Brothers, which was named Businessweek’s #1 general business book of 2011, and the novel ALL THE EVIL OF THIS WORLD, published in 2016, THOSE BASTARDS: 69 Essays on Life, Creativity, and Meaning, published in 2023, and NO WORRIES: How To Live a Stress Free Financial Life, to be published in 2024. Additionally, Jared is an adjunct professor in the business program at Coastal Carolina University. Jared is also an investment strategist at Mauldin Economics, and previously contributed to Bloomberg Opinion, Forbes and TheStreet.com. His media appearances include MSNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV, BNN, The New York Times, LA Times, Business Insider, Marketwatch, Yahoo! Finance, and dozens of local and syndicated radio programs. He is also the host of The Jared Dillian Show, a nationally syndicated radio show on personal finance. In his spare time, Jared is a progressive house DJ and speaks frequently on mental health issues at financial institutions.