All That I Have Met

About All That I Have Met

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 (https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

12 Feb 2026

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

31 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   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 (https://www.sfinternationallitfest.org/authors) runs 14–16 May 2027. Tickets go on sale 25 January. Please follow this podcast on Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-that-i-have-met/id1876949326) or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/03LHqNZxz89s919bFMj2iY), 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 (https://www.youtube.com/@AllThatIHaveMet) 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 (https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   1 Oct 2026

   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 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-that-i-have-met/id1876949326) or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/03LHqNZxz89s919bFMj2iY), 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 (https://www.youtube.com/@AllThatIHaveMet) 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 (https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   17 Sept 2026

   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 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-that-i-have-met/id1876949326) or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/03LHqNZxz89s919bFMj2iY), 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 (https://www.youtube.com/@AllThatIHaveMet) 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 (https://meredithogilviethompson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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