All That I Have Met

Brand Builder

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 [https://www.freshbritain.com/brand-services], 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. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2603908/fan_mail/new] If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here [https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe] Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Mr Mansour Goes to Washington

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 anyway, he was  the one who read from the autopsy report. Eventually, he walked away. This conversation is about what he saw in those rooms, what it cost him to stay as long as he did, and what he's doing now that he's out. Along the way: growing up Lebanese-American in Pittsburgh, living in Beirut before the war, and a career that took stranger turns than most. Mark doesn't hedge. He is, as he'd be the first to tell you, not that kind of lawyer. Have something to say? I'm all ears. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2603908/fan_mail/new] If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here [https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe] Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Dispatch: Péter Dósa on the Election in Hungary and Why Americans Should Be Paying Attention

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 at eight and, though he grew up in Ireland and Barcelona, never stopped watching Hungary. He founded The Hungary Report to do what most outlets don’t: explain Orbán’s system in depth, for an international audience that now spans more than 110 countries. Péter doesn’t come with a think tank title. What he has is rarer — he understands the system from the inside. We spoke the week of Hungary’s 2026 election, which Politico Europe called the EU’s most important of the year. But our conversation wasn’t really about that election — it was about a set of tools for dismantling democracy, tools that have been field-tested for sixteen years in a Central European country and are now being deployed at scale elsewhere. Péter explains how the system was built, how it bends rather than breaks the rules, and why regulated-out-of-existence is harder to fight than banned. He cast his ballot by post from Barcelona before we spoke. It was the first time in his adult life he thought his vote might actually change something. Photo: Bjoern Wylezich Have something to say? I'm all ears. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2603908/fan_mail/new] If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here [https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe] Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

Dispatch: Sam Kiley on the Middle East

"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 World Affairs Editor of The Independent, a two-time Emmy winner, and — perhaps most usefully — not an American journalist. So he has no institutional reason to edit what he reports. I called him on March 29th, two days after the Houthis entered the fight and the day after President Zelenskyy signed defence agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We covered a lot of ground: the logic, or lack of it, behind the US-Israeli strikes on Iran; what the Mosaic defence strategy means for anyone still thinking in 20th-century military terms; why Houthi involvement could reshape global trade in ways most people aren't tracking; and what Gaza's endgame actually looks like when you strip away the noise. There was also something I didn't expect: a case that the war in the Middle East may be doing more for Ukraine's long-term survival than three years of Western military aid. And a question about where, right now, Sam sees the ingredients for a coup most clearly assembled. The answer is not where most people would look. Photo: Bjoern Wylezich Have something to say? I'm all ears. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2603908/fan_mail/new] If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here [https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe] Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

The State of Things

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. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2603908/fan_mail/new] If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's how the show gets found. And if you'd like to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way.  Subscribe here [https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe] Credits: Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs Music: Ilya Kuznetsov