Michael Kao is a veteran macro investor, former hedge fund manager, and founder of Akanthos Capital Management, now running his family office. A UC Berkeley EE/CS and Wharton MBA graduate who traded commodities at Goldman Sachs and co-founded Canyon Capital Arbitrage Fund, he built his career on a proprietary framework called 'Alpha With Asymmetry.' Known online as @UrbanKaoboy, he publishes the Kaoboy Musings newsletter on Substack - covering finance, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and thrash metal - and co-hosts the KAOS THEORY podcast with Grant Williams.
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute, and one of the most widely-read public intellectuals in economics and geopolitics. His newsletter Chartbook on Substack has over 181,000 subscribers and his books - including The Wages of Destruction, Crashed, and Shutdown - have reshaped how historians, economists, and policymakers understand financial crises, the Nazi economy, and global disorder. He popularized the term 'polycrisis' and co-hosts the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze. Known for his extraordinary output, analytical range, and willingness to publicly revise his views, Tooze is that rare figure who straddles academic history and live economic commentary with equal authority.
Doomberg is the pseudonymous green-chicken persona behind the most-read finance newsletter on Substack, with 373,000+ subscribers. Run by a tight-knit team of former heavy-industry executives and private-equity professionals, Doomberg delivers lateral-thinking analysis on energy, finance, and geopolitics - unapologetically pro-nuclear, data-driven, and fiercely independent. Launched in May 2021, the publication grew from zero to the #1 finance newsletter on Substack without spending a dollar on marketing, making it one of the most remarkable organic media success stories of the independent publishing era.
Jordan Schneider is the founder and editor-in-chief of ChinaTalk, the premier independent newsletter and podcast covering US-China tech and policy. A Yale-educated historian who earned a master's in economics from Peking University's Yenching Academy, Schneider has built ChinaTalk into a 65,000-subscriber powerhouse with over 1 million podcast downloads in 2025 alone. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a former 2023-24 AWM Scholar, with bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wired, and Lawfare. Based in New York and fluent in Chinese, Schneider synthesizes elite policy analysis with accessible storytelling, covering semiconductors, AI development, export controls, and the full sweep of US-China competition.