"Journalism requires courage back in the newsroom every bit as much as it does on the front line."

Jon Williams has run three of the world's biggest newsrooms — BBC, ABC, RTÉ — through thirty years of war, revolution and dramatic changes in mainstream media. He's lost colleagues to the story, and had to tell a widow her husband wasn't coming home.

On watching reporters sit through an hour of public insults from the president at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, then stand and applaud him anyway, Jon told me, "I cannot get my head around that." And when the subject turns to Gaza, the deadliest place on earth to be a journalist right now, he doesn't pretend there are two sides to the death toll.

And then there’s ABC — his own former network — handing $15 million to a sitting president to make a lawsuit disappear. “There used to be a line beyond which nobody would step,” he said. “People have just lost the courage to step up to it, and peer over, and go no further.” 

There needs to be a shared truth for any of us to make sense of our lives. Without it, Jon says, we're all just flailing in the dark. This is a conversation about the importance of truth, and what happens when the people paid to defend it stop being brave enough to do so.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

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Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Congress is weaker. The presidency is stronger. Political parties are more polarised. And the Supreme Court now sits at the centre of some of America’s most contentious political debates.

How did we get here? And is this moment as unprecedented as it feels?

Julian Zelizer is one of the few people equipped to answer those questions. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, author of more than twenty books on American political history, and a regular contributor to NPR and Foreign Policy. He has spent his career studying power: how it is consolidated, abused and held in check.

In this conversation, we cover whether Congress’s surrender of power to the executive is a cause of the current crisis or merely a symptom; how the filibuster and budget reconciliation have reshaped what the Senate can do with a bare majority; the origins of the Electoral College and gerrymandering; the role of the Supreme Court during periods of intense polarisation; what happened to the American media; and what history tells us about the moments that felt more dangerous at the time than they turned out to be — and those that felt less dangerous than they were.

Since recording this episode, Zelizer has been named a Scholar in Residence at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, where he will spend the coming academic year working on a new book, Rendezvous with Democracy: America, 1945–1974.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

“The token is a measure of input. It’s not a measure of output.”

That observation, from economist Michael Power, goes to the heart of this conversation — the possibility that we are fundamentally misreading the AI boom.

Michael Power spent two decades as Global Strategist at Ninety One, formerly Investec Asset Management. Steven Boykey Sidley spent years as Group Chief Technology Officer at a prominent Fortune 500 company before becoming Professor of Practice at the Johannesburg Business School, a partner at Bridge Capital, and a columnist-at-large at the Daily Maverick. Together they argue that the race for AI is no longer simply a technological contest, but a contest between competing economic systems, competing political philosophies, and competing visions of who should own intelligence itself.

Recorded on June 25, 2026, this conversation covers trillion-dollar valuations built on losses, pension funds corralled into holding equity they never consented to own, the Chinese open-weight ecosystem that could make the US AI business model structurally irrelevant, and why the democratic backlash against artificial intelligence — however legitimate — may be the most consequential strategic error of our time.

Not long before recording this episode, Power asked DeepSeek to rewrite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 — “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” — to describe what is happening in AI today. What came back, in seconds, reads like an uncanny gloss on the argument Power and Sidley make about open weights and closed fortresses:

How many ways will those fortress walls collapse?
Let me count the ways—on cost, on speed, on might,
On data’s flow, on talent’s flight, on gaps
In licensing, in ecosystem’s light.
The fortress thought its walls were built to last—
On hardware, training, benchmarks, and control.
But open weights have broken through them fast,
And now the Free City has claimed its role.
The walls are down—not by a single blow,
But by a thousand cuts, a thousand ways.
The fortress cannot stop the open flow—
The Free City is rising—count the days.
How many ways? A hundred, more than ten—
The fortress falls, and freedom rises then.

Beneath the excitement about AI lies a far bigger story. This is it.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

In conversation with Comfort Ero.

“It’s not a beauty contest. There is no one path to resolution.”

In a world with sixty active conflicts, the President and CEO of the International Crisis Group isn’t looking for a silver bullet. She’s looking for openings.

Founded in 1995 in response to the failures of Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, the ICG has a mission that couldn’t be more straightforward: When war looms, sound the alarm. When it breaks out, work to stop it. When it drags on, find ways to alleviate the suffering it causes. Ero has spent twenty-five years doing exactly that — in West Africa, on the ground in Liberia with the UN, in transitional justice, and for the past four and a half years as head of the world’s most respected and consequential conflict prevention organisation.

We recorded this conversation five days after the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding that few are sure will hold. The trust deficit between Washington and Tehran, as Ero puts it, is “less than zero.” Add to that the extractive nature of this administration’s diplomacy, the way warfare is being reshaped every single day in Ukraine, and Sudan’s continuing inability to command the world’s attention despite being the largest humanitarian catastrophe on earth, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This conversation is for anyone trying to understand not just what is happening in the world right now, but the architecture of why. It's also a reminder of what serious, rigorous, field-based analysis looks like in an era when the assumptions that underpinned the international order no longer seem quite so certain.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

This is a conversation I had with filmmaker and AI producer Quint Boa on his podcast, AI Script to Screen, reposted here with his permission.

What happens to truth when facts become optional? In this conversation we get into the difference between facts and truth, why journalism is changing but not dying, what Section 230 actually did to public discourse, and why AI is a brilliant tool but should never be mistaken for a substitute for human connection. We also get into the uncanny valley of digital resurrection, Christopher Nolan’s flip phone, and why a story about cemeteries in rural Virginia took me four months to report. Recorded in May 2026.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

"The garden you're standing in is worth the full force of your attention."

Neal Wavra was on track for a career in global trade policy — trained in commercial diplomacy, as well as conflict resolution at the Hague — when his government supervisor flicked a proposal back across her desk without reading it and told him they weren’t in the business of innovating.

That was twenty years ago. He's since attended the Culinary Institute of America, worked the floor at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago — at the time, the most demanding room in American fine dining, the place that trained a generation, ten James Beard Awards — and eventually found his way to a building on Main Street in Marshall, Virginia that's been feeding people since the 1800s.

He and his wife Star have been running it as Field & Main for ten years. In 2023 they bought Red Truck Bakery — the business across the street — twice listed among the New York Times’ best food purveyors in the country and a favourite of everyone from Oprah to the Obamas. This year, Neal was a James Beard Award finalist — the only one from the great state of Virginia.

But our conversation isn’t really about any of that. It’s about what happens when you decide the thing directly in front of you is enough — and the garden you’re standing in is worth the full force of your attention.

Neal has views on all of it — on farm-to-table as an alibi for mediocrity, on what genuine connection between a kitchen and its community actually requires, on whether excellence needs external recognition to be real — and they’re not what you’d expect.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

A German biotech billionaire who injects himself daily is funding a sporting event where athletes are paid to take testosterone, Adderall and human growth hormone in pursuit of “superhumanity.”

Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. are on the cap table.

Jeff Bezos has invested $100 million in a startup that claims it can identify the brain’s “core algorithm” and replicate it in silicon.

Meanwhile, public institutions, scientific research and foreign-aid programs are being hollowed out at the behest of many of the same political and ideological forces.

Naturally, I had to talk to the clever hosts of The Atlantic Current podcast about it all.

We discuss the Enhanced Games, biohacking billionaires, prescription drugs, consciousness research, regulatory capture, libertarianism, immortality and the increasingly popular idea that being human is a problem technology needs to solve.

The Atlantic Current is hosted by Vince Martin, an economist and writer and Tull McAdoo of the Irish Politics Newsletter. It’s a smart, irreverent show and I love every minute chatting with these two.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

"Women expected equal partnerships and men expected their careers to come first. The men's expectations were exceeded."

A survey of Harvard Business School graduates — ambitious, educated, the ones who were supposed to have figured it out — found that the women expected equal partnerships and the men expected their careers to come first.

The men's expectations were exceeded.

Bobbi Thomason is a professor at Pepperdine's business school, a Stanford-trained engineer, tenured ahead of schedule, and one of the leading researchers in her field on women, work and negotiation. She also moved across the country for her husband's job while studying exactly why women move across the country for their husband's jobs. 

Her conclusion, after fifteen years of research: if you're having the conversation about equality in your marriage, you've probably already lost the battle. The decisions that shape everything — who moves, who steps back, who gets the bigger career — tend to be made before anyone sits down to talk.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever been managed, undermined, talked over or passed over. Which, the data suggests, is most of us — as Bobbi makes clear, this isn't only about women.

Her book, Vows to Ourselves, publishes March 2027 from HarperCollins.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

This is a bonus episode — a guest appearance I made on The Atlantic Current with Vince Martin and Tull McAdoo, reposted here with their kind permission.

They brought me on to talk about the Ebola outbreak currently unfolding in the DRC. We ended up covering a lot of ground: how Ebola spreads and how it doesn't, what the gutting of USAID, GAVI and the CDC actually means for an outbreak happening right now in a remote and conflict-adjacent corner of the world, and why American foreign aid was never charity — but self-interest.

We also talked about Africa more broadly, and the extraordinary gap between what the continent actually is and what most Americans think they know about it.

The Atlantic Current is hosted by Vince Martin, an economist and writer, and creator of Wall Street and Main, and Tull McAdoo of the Irish Politics Newsletter. It's a smart, irreverent show and I loved every minute being with these two.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

He asked a room full of LVMH executives to raise their hands if they were wearing a watch. Then to put them down if it wasn't a Rolex. Half the hands stayed up.

"That's the hole in your soul," he said. "That's what the watch is telling everybody."

As co-founder of FreshBritain, Bob Sheard has spent thirty years building the tools that taught companies to behave like people — from Levi's and Burberry to Converse and Arc'teryx. He was headhunted onto the Karrimor board in his twenties by the Benetton family and called in to advise the Gandhi family during the world's largest general election. 

Then those same tools escaped the boardroom and were absorbed by...people.

I called him to find out what that's costing us — and whether there's a way back. His answer involves an ice axe company, a jacket that will eventually become a carrot, and a four-week programme designed to reach every kid at the exact moment their identity is most formative.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, please leave a rating, follow the show and share it with someone else. It's how the podcast gets found.

If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription to All That I Have Met goes a long way. Subscribe here

If you'd like to watch clips and video previews, you'll find them on  YouTube 

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov