All That I Have Met

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...

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...

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...

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 happeni...

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...

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...

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." That's Sam Kiley, near the end of our conversation. And the line I keep coming back to. 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...

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 t...

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 b...