Today I sit down with Jan Růžička. Jan is the Chief External Affairs Officer at PPF Group, where he manages public affairs, communications, regulatory strategy, and ESG across 23 countries. He’s spent much of the last decade in Asia—Beijing and Hong Kong in particular—building out PPF’s presence in finance and external affairs.
But Jan’s career didn’t start in boardrooms. He was on the ground in some of the world’s most turbulent places: post-Qaddafi Libya, the Jordan–Syria refugee crisis, Ukraine’s Maidan in 2014, Myanmar, and China. Before that, he was Director-General at the Czech Ministry of Health, pushing through reform and navigating international institutions like the EU, WHO, and the United Nations. Alongside all this, he’s taught behavioral economics in finance and healthcare at universities across Asia and Europe.
Our conversation moves between the personal and the global. We talk about what it means to make sense of chaos, how political polarization shapes the world we live in, and whether grand strategy is still possible when disruption feels permanent. We also dig into power and AI—how technology changes not just geopolitics, but how people imagine the future.
