In Conversation with Aniket Shah.

Most people who work in finance don't question capitalism. And most people who question capitalism don't work in finance. Aniket Shah does both — which turns out to be a very useful position to occupy.

For more than a decade, he’s been making an argument most of his industry considers fringe: that markets don't drive economies, governments do; and that the state of capitalism isn't inevitable, it's a choice — and understanding how we got here reveals things could be different. On 17 March 2026 — a week after our conversation — the World Bank published a landmark reversal on industrial policy. It said, more or less, the same thing Aniket’s been saying for years.

Our conversation is about what it takes to hold a position when the consensus is against you, how to read the world's largest economic shifts before they show up in the data, and why the most interesting analyst at one of the world's biggest investment banks sounds, occasionally, like a philosopher.

Aniket leads Washington Policy and Sustainability Research at Jefferies (his team has been ranked number one in the US and Europe), and moves between finance, development, academia and sustainability in a way that makes you wonder why anyone would ever choose between them.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

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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 Michael Power.

America is not behind on AI. It’s fighting the wrong war entirely.

Michael Power spent more than thirty years as a global strategist at Ninety-One (formerly Investec Asset Management), advising investors and governments on the shifting architecture of capital — his worldview shaped by questioning the assumptions most people take for granted, including the ones buried in language itself. When he traced the etymology of the word economics and found that both — despite one being Mycenaean Greek and one Carthaginian — converge on pasture, he built a framework for reading capital the way nomads read terrain. The trick being to always leave before the grass runs out.

It was that instinct — to search for the story underneath the story, to see the world from vantage points the West routinely ignores — that led him to China, AI and, eventually, a conclusion most of his peers had rejected. The US is building cathedrals while China is weaving a nervous system. And only one of those strategies scales.

Our conversation was recorded six weeks before Anthropic released new tools that spooked investors and hammered software stocks. Bloomberg reported nearly a trillion dollars wiped off in a week. Microsoft fell despite beating earnings. The market is now asking which companies can survive AI disruption — while Michael’s thesis about the cracks in the edifice plays out in real time.

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