Wars and revolutions are where Markos cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent. Markos is currently an award-winning, nationally-syndicated foreign affairs columnist, author, and scholar.

Columns by Markos appear weekly in the McClatchy chain of 30 newspapers from Sacramento, California to Miami, Florida. His work is in global syndication and read worldwide from South Korea to the Middle Eastern Gulf states. In 2018, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists recognized “Kounalakis’s world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education.”

Newsweek and NBC-Mutual News posted Markos as a foreign correspondent in news bureaus in Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. Both in superpower capitals and regional outposts, Kounalakis covered dramatic political and military developments at the end of the 20th century – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the street protests in Budapest, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, revolutionary movements in Bulgaria, and the violent overthrow of the Romanian regime. He was present at the Warsaw Pact meeting where the organization was dissolved. Markos covered the early phases of Yugoslavia’s civil war and went to Afghanistan with the Soviets to cover the last stages of their military occupation and rise of the Mujahedin.

Markos later became the president and publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine and host of the POTUS ’08 satellite-distributed program “Washington Monthly on the Radio.” Earlier in his journalism career he co-produced and co-hosted the weekly syndicated radio program, “Spotlight on World Affairs.” He is currently a co-host of the public broadcasting “World Affairs” program. Markos frequently appears on television as a foreign affairs analyst.

Books authored by Markos are wide-ranging – from the Silicon Valley’s global technological revolution to America’s geopolitical struggles with China and Russia. His latest book, “Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering”, was published in 2018.

A political scientist, Markos is currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Markos earned his Ph.D. from Central European University, MSc at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and his BSc at the University of California, Berkeley He was an International Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

In 2017, President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Kounalakis to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Markos Kounalakis is married to Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis, California's Lt. Governor-elect. The couple are the proud parents of two boys, Neo and Eon.

Drew Banks (www.drewbanks.com) is an entrepreneur, business author, and novelist. In his business writing as well as fiction, Drew deconstructs behavioral patterns in an attempt to explore causal motivations and deterrents. While Drew's first two books, BEYOND SPIN and CUSTOMER.COMMUNITY, examine organizational implications of various social psychologies, he is drawn to fiction (ABLE WAS I, ERE I SAW ELBA) as a more intimate medium for delving beneath the surface of an individual.