GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Patrick Chalmers was born in Fife, central Scotland in 1966, spending most of his first two decades in Moray, further North. He studied engineering and French at Bath University and journalism at London’s City University before starting as a freelance reporter in Brussels. In 1994, he joined Reuters, where he spent 11 years on postings in London, Kuala Lumpur, and reporting assignments elsewhere. His topics included global climate change, world trade, and various financial crashes and their impacts. Slowly, he learned something of the political threads joining them all. Grown disillusioned with the lack of balance at Reuters, he secured redundancy and moved to SW France. From there, he wrote Fraudcast News in 2012, a confessional critique of politics and journalism. Since then, his work has included freelancing for The Correspondent, among others. In 2017, he co-founded All Hands On, an independent film maker looking at people practicing radically better politics for everyone. He is currently focused on how everyday individuals can learn the necessary skills to practice politics themselves, even in war zones such as Israel-Palestine.
GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: John Hulsman, author of The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism, is the President and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. Literally, the sun never sets on John's political risk analysis: He is Senior Columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the city of London, while also writing regular columns on geopolitics, macroeconomics, and politics for Arab News in Riyadh, The Hill newspaper in Washington, Aspen in Rome, and various outlets in New Delhi.