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 brilliant tool but should never be mistaken for a substitute for human connection. We also get into the uncanny valley of digital resurrection, Christopher Nolan’s flip phone, and why a story about cemeteries in rural Virginia took me four months to report. Recorded in May 2026.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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 America, worked the floor at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago — at the time, the most demanding room in American fine dining, the place that trained a generation, ten James Beard Awards — and eventually found his way to a building on Main Street in Marshall, Virginia that's been feeding people since the 1800s.

He and his wife Star have been running it as Field & Main for ten years. In 2023 they bought Red Truck Bakery — the business across the street — twice listed among the New York Times’ best food purveyors in the country and a favourite of everyone from Oprah to the Obamas. This year, Neal was a James Beard Award finalist — the only one from the great state of Virginia.

But our conversation isn’t really about any of that. It’s about what happens when you decide the thing directly in front of you is enough — and the garden you’re standing in is worth the full force of your attention.

Neal has views on all of it — on farm-to-table as an alibi for mediocrity, on what genuine connection between a kitchen and its community actually requires, on whether excellence needs external recognition to be real — and they’re not what you’d expect.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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, public institutions, scientific research and foreign-aid programs are being hollowed out at the behest of many of the same political and ideological forces.

Naturally, I had to talk to the clever hosts of The Atlantic Current podcast about it all.

We discuss the Enhanced Games, biohacking billionaires, prescription drugs, consciousness research, regulatory capture, libertarianism, immortality and the increasingly popular idea that being human is a problem technology needs to solve.

Also: Andrew Carnegie, Mansa Musa, God, and whether Bryan Johnson is conducting cutting-edge science or simply having the world’s most expensive midlife crisis.

The Atlantic Current is hosted by Vince Martin, an economist and writer, and creator of Wall Street and Main, and Tull McAdoo of the Irish Politics Newsletter. It’s a smart, irreverent show and I love every minute chatting with these two.

For more, check out my original reporting on America’s prescription drug culture, The Bitter Pill, and my latest essay, Hold My Beer While I Upgrade Humanity.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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, tenured ahead of schedule, and one of the leading researchers in her field on women, work and negotiation. She also moved across the country for her husband's job while studying exactly why women move across the country for their husband's jobs.

Her conclusion, after fifteen years of research: if you're having the conversation about equality in your marriage, you've probably already lost the battle. The decisions that shape everything — who moves, who steps back, who gets the bigger career — tend to be made before anyone sits down to talk.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever been managed, undermined, talked over or passed over. Which, the data suggests, is most of us — as Bobbi makes clear, this isn't only about women.

Her book, Vows to Ourselves, publishes March 2027 from HarperCollins.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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 right now in a remote and conflict-adjacent corner of the world, and why American foreign aid was never charity — but self-interest.

We also talked about Africa more broadly, and the extraordinary gap between what the continent actually is and what most Americans think they know about it.

The Atlantic Current is hosted by Vince Martin, an economist and writer, and creator of Wall Street and Main, and Tull McAdoo of the Irish Politics Newsletter. It's a smart, irreverent show and I loved every minute being with these two.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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 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.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov

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.

If this conversation meant something to you, share it — it's still the best way new listeners discover the show.

The podcast is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the reporting, essays and interviews behind these conversations, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Subscribe here

Want more between essays and episodes? Check out Below the Fold —dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to, from the people in my own backyard to those reshaping the wider world.

Watch clips and video previews on YouTube

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov