All That I Have Met

Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Long-form, unhurried conversations with people who've actually been in the room — from a UN crisis negotiator working sixty wars at once to an BBC executive who watched newsroom courage disappear. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Hosted by award-winning journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson. meredithogilviethompson.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Pineapples and Promises: What USAID Left Behind in Liberia

    “You don’t have a choice but to be resilient, because the alternative is to give up. And we can see all around us what the price of giving up is.” A pineapple takes close to two years to grow. You plant it, wait and trust the field will still be yours when you return. For Ahamadu Sirleaf, that trust was at the heart of a project that promised to transform pineapple farming in Liberia. A software engineer and patent holder, Ahamadu is the nephew by marriage of Liberian Nobel Laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — the first woman on the continent of Africa to be elected president. He grew up during the country’s civil war, eventually making his way to the United States to study. Years later, after surviving leukaemia and building businesses of his own, he identified both a gap in the US supply chain and an opportunity to build an industrial-scale pineapple production business in his country of origin. Working through the government contractor DAI, USAID’s Africa Trade and Investment Activity — the flagship programme of the Prosper Africa initiative — identified his original project in Ghana and agreed to deploy $1.1 million in matching funds if Ahamadu relocated the business to Liberia. The plan was ambitious: build a processing factory, establish a reliable supply chain, and give farmers a dependable market for their crops. Agreements were signed, families relocated and businesses began springing up around the project. Then, in January 2025, a stop-work order arrived. The consequences went far beyond a loss of funding. There were several containers of equipment en route to the port, which would need to be paid for, as well as money committed to construction, contracts to honour and the livelihoods of some 2,400 farmers who had changed how they worked and lived to accommodate the single crop focus of the project to consider. After months of trying to get answers and final payment, he received $250,000 — a fraction of the $6.8 million he claimed. In this conversation, I speak with Ahamadu about the benefits of foreign aid when it supports trade and investment, and the staggering cost when that investment is abruptly terminated. We also discuss what resilience means when the people who have placed their trust in you are counting on you to find a way forward. Ahamadu is still fighting to salvage what he can — he has repurposed the water-purification equipment from his factory into a clean water business that helps keep part of his team employed. His story is a reminder that the consequences of dismantling an institution are measured not only in budgets and contracts, but in the lives and livelihoods built around them. Please follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating or review. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    Pineapples and Promises: What USAID Left Behind in Liberia

  2. Oct 15

    What Keeps Books Alive: Megan Mulry on Community, Belonging and the Stories We Can’t Afford to Lose

    “Anything that disrupts power, people are going to try to squash it. And maybe this is Pollyanna of me, but when I see the banned books list, I just want to run out and get all of those books.” Megan Mulry has occupied almost every corner of the literary world. From stints at The New Yorker and Boston Magazine to writing bestselling novels — her book A Royal Pain was a USA Today bestseller and an NPR Best Book of the Year — to eight years at Radius Books, the Santa Fe nonprofit known equally for its beautiful fine-art books and generosity to libraries and schools across the country. She now heads up the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, a multi-day event that brings together world-renowned authors, thinkers, educators and readers in celebration of ideas and the power of story. We talk about the special alchemy of pairing writers in conversation, what it takes to engage an audience, and how books can activate both individuals and communities, as well as preserve the stories we cannot afford to lose. Recorded during Banned Books Week, we also discuss the removal of books from schools and libraries, and what Megan and her colleagues are doing to keep books on the shelves of rural New Mexico libraries. Given this episode drops the day the festival’s 2027 schedule is announced, Megan gives us a glimpse of who’s confirmed for next year — including Joyce Carol Oates, Min Jin Lee, Billy Collins, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Hernan Diaz, Ana Castillo, Richard Flanagan, Stephen Graham Jones and Lily King, among many others. And, because neither of us can resist a book recommendation, we finish with a few suggestions for anyone who has fallen out of the habit of reading — including Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 and Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare. The Santa Fe International Literary Festival runs 14–16 May 2027. Tickets go on sale 25 January. Please follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating or review. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    What Keeps Books Alive: Megan Mulry on Community, Belonging and the Stories We Can’t Afford to Lose

  3. Oct 1

    What Hungary's Comeback Could Mean for the US Midterms

    “If Americans don’t take this chance now in November, I do think it’s going to be extremely, extremely difficult in 2028 to get Trump’s and MAGA’s hands out of power.” Péter Dósa spent sixteen years watching his own country disappear into what its prime minister proudly called an illiberal state — and this April, from exile in Barcelona, he watched Hungarians vote it out in a single afternoon. He’s the founder of the Hungary Report, read in over 110 countries, and he’s back on the show for the second time to make sense of what’s happened since: a government trying to rebuild, at breakneck speed, everything the last one spent sixteen years tearing down. One of Orbán’s oldest friends was a plumber from his home village. He’s now one of the richest men in Hungary. “I’m sorry,” Péter told me, “but it wasn’t because he was great at fixing toilets.” That man is still in the country, still acting unbothered, even as a new national asset recovery office opens investigations into exactly how men like him got so rich. Orbán himself has already warned his own loyalists to keep track of who’s running it — in case, he says, he ever gets back in. We recorded this the same week Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and the rest of the press pool went dark rather than profit from it. Péter’s own country lost its most trusted newsroom in 2020, when the paper Index was quietly taken over and almost the entire staff resigned rather than stay. Hungarians noticed. This year, given the choice of where to send one percent of their taxes, more of them chose independent media than almost anything else on the list. “Democracy is not something you just keep in a box and look at,” Péter said, near the end. “It’s more like a flower in a garden. We really have to keep tending to it. We have to fight for it.” He means that as a warning as much as a hope — for a country that nearly lost its garden altogether, and for one that still has a few weeks left to decide whether it will. Please follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating or review. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    What Hungary's Comeback Could Mean for the US Midterms

  4. Sep 17

    Bearing Witness: A View from Nepal

    On August 26th, a glacier collapsed in the Himalayas near the Nepal-China border, unleashing a wall of water, mud and debris down the Trishuli river system. Five days on, the death toll had passed 900, with more than 4,700 people still missing. Entire towns had been erased. On August 30th, I spoke with Shekhar Karki, a young Nepali filmmaker, and Nigel Roberts, who first worked in Nepal fifty years ago and later served as the World Bank’s country director there. Two days earlier, they had driven two and a half hours to Bidur, to the point where the road, having been washed away by the floods, simply stops. From there they watched helicopters ferrying survivors out and supplies in, then went on to Kathmandu’s Teaching Hospital, where families were still waiting for news of the people they’d lost. Shekhar described the drive as the moment scale became real — a road jammed with rescue teams and journalists ending abruptly in what he called quicksand. But it was the hospital afterward that affected him most: watching families wait for news of the missing, with only a handful of people there to help them cope. Using social media, he later organised more than twenty-five counsellors to meet the need he'd seen firsthand. Nepal’s government is barely six months old — led by 36-year-old Balendra Shah, a former mayor swept to power on the same wave of youth anger that toppled the previous administration in last September’s Gen Z uprising. This is its first real crisis and, as Nigel put it, "this flood is an enormous test of the resources — the focus, the prioritisation, the wisdom of the government." Early signs, he said, point to public confidence holding. “There's a tremendous sense of both optimism and solidarity.” But with estimates in the billions of dollars in terms physical damage alone, the young government has a long way to go to get to high, safe ground. Please follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating or review. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    Bearing Witness: A View from Nepal

  5. Sep 3

    The Cow in the Room: Tom Silvester on Conservation in Kenya

    In 1992, a young livestock manager named Tom Silvester arrived at Loisaba, a cattle ranch in Northern Kenya with a few hundred head, one old Land Rover and a payroll of about twenty-five people. Not long after, he was shown a skull — the last black rhino to walk this land before it was poached out in the 1970s. Thirty years on, he’s still there, running what many consider to be one of the finest conservation trusts in the world — 58,000 acres that is home to cattle, elephants, lions, a community of hundreds, and, once again, rhinos. Bringing the latter back took five years of political negotiation and a translocation by truck. The first night nearly ended it all when a newly arrived female was attacked by lions before she’d got fifty metres from the truck. Rangers stood guard over her until dawn, uncertain if the whole effort would collapse. She survived and went on to have a calf. Two years later, there are now twenty-nine black rhinos on Loisaba, eight that have been born there. I spoke with Tom about what it costs to run a place like this, and about the long, slow work behind the rhino story, as well as the shift from a private family ranch to a Kenyan trust, the grazing arrangements Tom has kept with Samburu and Maasai neighbours, and a herd of over a thousand cattle he manages on their behalf under a fattening scheme — because as he puts it, you don’t do anything about anything in northern Kenya without a cow in the room. Learn more about Loisaba Conservancy and support the Ranger Challenge Photo: ©️Ami Vitale | Courtesy TNC Please follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    The Cow in the Room: Tom Silvester on Conservation in Kenya

  6. Aug 20

    Former BBC, ABC and RTÉ Head Jon Williams on the Loss of Courage in the Newsroom

    "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. Please follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating or review. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    Former BBC, ABC and RTÉ Head Jon Williams on the Loss of Courage in the Newsroom

  7. Aug 6

    How Bad Is It? Princeton Historian Julian Zelizer on American Democracy and Political Power

    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. Please follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you usually listen, and leave a rating. It takes a minute but is how the podcast gets found. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    How Bad Is It? Princeton Historian Julian Zelizer on American Democracy and Political Power

  8. Jul 23

    Who Owns Intelligence and How Should It Be Priced?

    “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 we are fundamentally mispricing and 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 gapsIn 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. 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. Watch clips of the interview on YouTube Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read or listen to — subscribe for free and never miss an episode. Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov Get full access to All That I Have Met at meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe

    Who Owns Intelligence and How Should It Be Priced?
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About

Long-form, unhurried conversations with people who've actually been in the room — from a UN crisis negotiator working sixty wars at once to an BBC executive who watched newsroom courage disappear. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Hosted by award-winning journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson. meredithogilviethompson.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson
  • Show Website
    All That I Have Met