Earlylands in Conversation

A discussion series with leading thinkers focused on issues at the intersection of business, politics, and culture. Whether it be trends in corporate deal-making, shifts in geopolitics, or notable new writing, our aim is to focus on the ideas and themes that drive headlines, inform boardroom conversations, and motivate policymakers.

Earlylands in Conversation is a news podcast hosted by Earlylands Advisory, with 38 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Earlylands Advisory hosts Earlylands in Conversation, a news show with 38 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Earlylands in Conversation

  Ep. 39 - "Optimism Doesn't Equal Satisfaction": Defense Industrialist Ivor Ichikowitz on Life After Paramount, from African Youth and Oral History to the Battlefield Labs of Africa and Ukraine

  Sep 28, 202637 min

  For this episode, we are joined by South African defense industrialist and philanthropist Ivor Ichikowitz. In 1994, as apartheid ended and most observers wrote off South Africa's defense industry, Ivor founded Paramount Group and built it into Africa's largest privately owned defense and aerospace company. He stepped back from daily leadership of Paramount in 2022 and has since put his energy into the Ichikowitz Family Foundation. Much of our conversation focuses on two of the foundation's projects. The African Oral History Archive holds thousands of hours of testimony from every side of South Africa's transition from apartheid, and it produced the recent seven-part Netflix docuseries The Trials of Winnie Mandela . The African Youth Survey, now in its fourth edition, interviewed nearly 5,000 young Africans aged 18 to 24 across 16 countries earlier this year. Its findings show a generation more optimistic about its future than at any point since the pandemic, though, in Ivor's words, "optimism doesn't equal satisfaction." We close on Ukraine, and on Ivor's view that Africa's ongoing experience of insurgency, coupled with Ukraine's war with Russia, makes the two geographies the laboratories for the next generation of warfare. A note on audio: there are some minor issues with my audio levels during the conversation, but Ivor's audio is unaffected. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and like and subscribe on YouTube. Links mentioned: The Trials of Winnie Mandela (Netflix), official trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4 African Youth Survey 2026 – https://africanyouthsurvey.org/ Books mentioned: Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin – https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881530

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Earlylands in Conversation

  Ep. 37 - "It Wasn't Lack of Conversation, It Was a Lack of Understanding": Bancroft Prize-Winning Historian Odd Arne Westad on What 1914 Teaches Us About 2026

  Sep 1, 202634 min

  In 1914 the heads of state of Germany, Russia, and Britain were cousins. They knew each other intimately and they corresponded constantly. What they could not do was understand what the others were actually trying to achieve, and historian Arne Westad thinks that failure is the lesson from 1914 that we have the most to learn from today. Westad's new book is The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict,and Warnings from History , published in March by Henry Holt in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom. The book argues that the present arrangement of global power resembles the decades before 1914, when a widening field of countries competed for regional dominance and nationalism and populism rose together. In our conversation we cover how Westad's thesis applies to the myriad conflicts and disputes playing out in the world of 2026. The Financial Times called The Coming Storm fluently written and wide-ranging. Writing in Foreign Affairs , Elizabeth Samet said Westad performs an urgent and inestimable service. Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a fellow of the British Academy and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His earlierbook The Global Cold War won the Bancroft Prize and reset how the Cold War is written by telling it through the interventions in the Global South, Africa most prominently. Restless Empire , his history of Chinese foreign relations since the eighteenth century, won the Asia Society Book Award. Recorded in June 2026. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast : -The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad -The Curse of Empire: Ukraine, Poland, and the Fatal Paths in Russian History by Martin Schulze Wessel -The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark -Haunted by Chaos: China's Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping by Sulmaan Wasif Khan

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Earlylands in Conversation

  Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 35 - "Russia Has Leaned Into Its Worst Impulses": RUSI’s Dr. Jack Watling on Ukraine's Changed Battlefield Dynamic

  Jul 28, 202641 min

  Russia's military is materially weaker today than it was a year ago, and Ukraine has established an asymmetric approach that drives up the cost of every Russian advance. Yet those facts still do not guarantee Kyiv the ending it wants. Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and one of the world's leading experts on the war in Ukraine. He is also the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and has spent the past four and a half years moving between London and Kyiv. His method rests on primary research: time with Ukrainian units at the front rather than reassessment of other people's data points. In this conversation: what the Ukrainians solved between 2024 and the beginning of 2026 and what the Russians did not; Russian force quality and replacement rates; why Jack believes the war has reached a turning point and why that is not the same as a happy ending; and the signposts he is watching over the next six to twelve months. We recorded as the news was breaking out of Kyiv about the replacement of Ukraine's defense minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so we do not address those changes directly. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast -Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling - Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott - Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Earlylands in Conversation

  Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 34 - "Do More With Less": Traxtion CEO James Holley on Turning Africa's Rail Bottlenecks Into a Continental Business

  Jul 13, 202642 min

  Rail rarely makes headlines, but it may be doing more to shape Africa's economic trajectory than any single mine or trade deal. James ('Jamie') Holley is CEO of Traxtion, the largest privately owned rail operator on the continent, with a deployed fleet of over 55 locomotives across ten countries, from South Africa's core network to the Tazara line linking Zambia to the Tanzanian coast. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Jamie to unpack what it actually takes to revive neglected rail corridors, why private capital is willing to take on infrastructure risk that governments have struggled to manage, and what a serious Transnet turnaround could mean for South Africa and the wider region. The numbers do the arguing. The Johannesburg-Durban line still runs on 1970s signalling, moving freight over 710 kilometers in roughly three days when it was designed to run trains every 20 minutes on an 18-hour transit. Modern positive train control could cut that to under ten hours and let Traxtion invoice the same train six times more often in a month. That gap between what the infrastructure could do and what it currently does is the essence of the conversation. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please like and follow. Books Mentioned on the Podcast -Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison by Howard Green -SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Succes s by Judy Johnson, Les Dakens, Peter Edwards, and Ned Morse

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Earlylands in Conversation

  Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 33 - Whose Dirt Is It Anyway: Chatham House’s Chris Vandome on the Politics of African Mineral Wealth

  Jun 30, 202640 min

  Critical minerals have become the connective tissue of modern geopolitics, linking energy security, manufacturing, and great power competition in ways that didn't exist a decade ago. Christopher Vandome leads the Critical Minerals Initiative at Chatham House, the London-based foreign policy think tank, where he's also a senior research fellow with both the Global Economy and Finance Programme and the Africa Programme. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Chris to unpack the African critical minerals story: the geopolitics, the financing gaps, and the question of who actually captures the value when resource wealth meets global demand. The conversation goes deep on Zambia and the broader southern Africa region, where mining policy, industrial strategy, and great power competition are converging in real time. A sharp, on-the-ground look at one of the defining economic and security stories on the African continent. Books Mentioned on the Podcast Mining Is Dead, Long Live Geopolitical Mining by Marta Rivera & Eduardo Zamanillo Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Earlylands in Conversation. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.