All That I Have Met

“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’...

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 year...

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 c...

"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 publi...

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 His...

“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...

“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...

In conversation with Comfort Ero. “It’s not a beauty contest. There is no one path to resolution,” Comfort Ero told me. 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 st...

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube  This is a bonus episode — a guest appearance I made on AI Script to Screen with Quint Boa, reposted here with his kind permission. What happens to truth when facts become optional? In this conversation with Quint Boa — filmmaker, AI producer and host of AI Script to Screen — we get into the difference between facts and truth, why journalism is changing bu...

This is a bonus episode — 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 brillia...

Watch clips on YouTube Neal Wavra was on track for a career in global trade policy — trained in commercial diplomacy and conflict resolution, a summer 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, worke...

In conversation with Neal Wavra.  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...

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, publ...

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, publ...

"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 women expected equal partnerships and men expected their careers to come first. The men’s expectations were exceeded. Bobbi Thomason is a professor...

In conversation with Bobbi Thomason 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, tenu...

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 ri...

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 happeni...

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 Burbe...

In conversation with Bob Sheard. 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...

Mark Mansour spent twenty-five years advising Fortune 500 companies on regulatory strategy — sitting in rooms where recalls were debated, regulations written and corporate interests weighed against the public. Then he walked away. In our conversation, Mark talks about growing up Lebanese-American in Pittsburgh, living in Beirut before the war, and a legal career that took him from the FDA to the E...

In conversation with Mark Mansour. Mark Mansour spent twenty-five years in rooms where the rules were being written, bent and sometimes broken — advising Fortune 500 companies on regulatory strategy, moving between FDA, EPA, Kraft, Kellogg and the corridors of corporate America. He was the lawyer who knew where the lines were and was paid to keep clients from crossing them. When they crossed them...

Péter Dósa was born in Budapest in 1998, nine years after the fall of communism. His family left when he was eight — Ireland first, then Barcelona, where he completed a master’s in democracies and multiculturalism. He founded The Hungary Report to do what mainstream outlets don’t: explain Orbán’s system in depth, for an international audience now spanning more than 110 countries. On April 12, Hung...

Viktor Orbán received a George Soros scholarship to study at Oxford. Years later, he regulated Soros’s university out of Budapest. The irony tells you most of what you need to know about the system he built — and why it’s worth understanding before it becomes more familiar than it already is. Péter Dósa was born in Budapest in 1998, nine years after the fall of communism. He left with his family a...

“ History is happening to people who have become very complacent about history being a thing that happens to other people.” Sam has covered every major conflict of the past thirty years — from Somalia, Rwanda and Iraq, to Afghanistan, Ukraine and — now — the widening war in the Middle East. He is World Affairs Editor of The Independent , a two-time Emmy winner, and — perhaps most usefully — not an...