"Elon Musk Shouldn't Have Done This..." - Elite Corruption, Immigration & Collapse | Rory Stewart

Why are so many Western economies right now very fragile? Well, I think one answer is that nobody really knows. I mean, it's amazing how often very distinguished Nobel Prize winning economists get this stuff wrong. But clearly, we have certain problems. And the most obvious one is demographic. So, most of our countries, our birth rates are falling. And we're getting older. And as we get older, we become more expensive to look after, particularly medical terms. Uh in in Britain, the statistics are very stark. When we set up the welfare state before the First World War, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today, we've got just under three working people for every one retired person. So, you can see the balance has changed very dramatically in terms of who's paying for who. Um second bit that comes out of that, of course, is that our economies are increasingly dependent on immigration. And that's particularly uh for running care systems, running service industries, but it but it's also increasingly true for skills. And the problem there is that immigration is very unpopular with large swaths of the population in the US and in Europe. And it's driving a lot of votes for the populist right. And I guess the center hasn't really worked out how to deal with that. So, maybe there's the two things to be getting on with. All right, those are two very good things. Um so, let's first address the demographic bombshell. Um as we have this happen, the pyramid gets inverted. We have a ton of people at the top that are going to require a lot of care. They're no longer in the workforce. Um is immigration going to be the only response to that? Or do you look at something like AI and you say AI AI is going to solve the problem? or do you take a totally different approach to this? Well, I think ultimately immigration can't continue always to be the answer. Because if you did that, your population would keep growing indefinitely. And the United States, I guess, is a very, very large country. But in somewhere like the United Kingdom, uh we're already more densely populated than India. So, uh if the pyramid inverted, and then you tried to build the bigger base to the pyramid by bringing in more and more people indefinitely over the next 300 years, you'd end up in an impossible situation. Ideally, you want not to have a pyramid at all. You want to have something that's pretty static and sustainable. And to get to that, you've really got to work out how to become more productive. And that includes more productive in the care industry, so that does involve learning from Japan on what can be done with machine learning, what can be done with robotics. It involves thinking seriously about jobs that we currently do that may be replaced by AI. And that, of course, we're often reluctant to do, cuz we're very risk averse. Uh we can be very impacted by regulations, by unions, and by others. Um but no, I don't think the answer can be indefinitely bringing in more and more younger people, because those people get old, and they in turn will have to be looked after by more and more younger people, and you'll end up with a never-ending growth. Okay, well, here is uh an interesting hypothesis. So, one thing that does seem to be playing out is that the immigrants that are coming into the country are coming from countries that have higher birth rates. Now, that could give you that static column that you're looking for. Over time, obviously, you're going to have this sort of weird transitionary period. But what becomes fascinating is you get this very populous spark against that, um because what drives the higher birth rates is a wildly different culture. That's that seems unarguable. And without putting any value judgment on whether one culture is better than another, I will say it is the architecture of the human mind is very tribal by nature. We grow up in the culture that we grow up in. We tend to hold on to that. And so anything that disrupts that is going to cause this sort of weird moment that I see us living through. Do you think that is an accurate read on why we're seeing populism now, or is there something else a foot? So, I think that that's partly it. Although remember that immigrant communities have often had much higher birth rates. So, if you look at the Irish-American community, when it began to come into large numbers in the United States late 19th, early 20th century, they had significantly larger families than the native And you Do you think that's a function of being an immigrant? It's usually a function of poverty. It's not really a question of of which part of the world you come from. Poorer people tend to have larger families. And that's partly because if you're a coming from a subsistence economy, you feel you need firstly, the labor of your children, but secondly, most importantly, you're worried some of the kids are going to die. And you need a lot of replacement. So, birth rates come down for a number of reasons. One of them is that you think that the children you have, you hope, are likely to survive into adulthood. Secondly, kids become more expensive. They they no longer seem as they might do if you're a a a small farmer in Ecuador or in Ireland as though they're a net positive income contributor to the the Instead, you get into a worldview where you think, "Oh my goodness, I'm going to have to pay for that college education, this, that, and the other, and they're not really going to bring me much in in return." Um so, we can see that as countries get wealthier, uh their their birth rates fall very dramatically. And that the biggest birth rates in the world, place like Niger, which at the moment is in the Sahara in Africa, has a birth rate of about 7.6 on average per couple. Whoa. But that's one of the very poorest countries on Earth. And I assume they still have a pretty dramatic um infant death rate. Huge infant mortality rates. Whereas countries like Italy, which had very high birth rates in the 1950s, are now in a position like the United States where the indigenous population is shrinking. [snorts] So, it's it's it's it's not a simple question of culture and religion in the way that we used to think. We used to think, you know, the point is that, I don't know, people from Italy or people from Ireland had big families because they were predominantly Catholics, and there were prohibitions on the use of birth control. It now seems more uh plausible that the reason they had bigger families, generally speaking, was that they were poorer. Is the the rise of populism predictable? Or is this a totally unrelated thing to immigration, totally unrelated to the economies, and it just happens to be happening at the same time? Because in my current mental model, they are effectively one in the same phenomena. Yeah. So, I think that the first thing is that you're right. There there's a very, very strong um factor there. Immigration is clearly driving the rise of far-right populism across Europe and the United States. And if you were trying to explain why the far right in Germany just got nearly a third of the vote in the latest state election, that's very closely related to immigration. You just have to see their literature, you have to interview their supporters, it's immigration. And the perception is that the ruling elite has failed to control borders. It's not It's a little bit a more nuanced than you might think because to often the people interviewed will say, "Look, we're reasonably happy with having a more diverse society. We just want to know that we've got control of our borders. In fact, we don't even mind more people coming in provided we think the government's making the choice to do that." rather than being forced to do it by in Britain, for example, a a debate between people who are very, very focused on the absolute numbers, uh which is a minority, and the people who are focused on people who are legally crossing on boats, which seems to be the thing that's upsetting people most. Um on your second question, which is are immigrant populations generally having more children? Yeah, there is some evidence for that. I mean, this stuff is all very controversial. Um and, you know, I'm wading into tricky territory, but it in London, for example, it seems as though over 60% of uh the children born in London are born to people whose parents were not born in the United Kingdom. When looking at this problem, there are obviously conspiracies that abound, the great replacement theory. People get very paranoid that there is something that is happening intentionally. Now, you've said that one of the ways to offset the um inverted pyramid is to bring in immigrants. Not going to solve the problem the whole way, but when you have an economy that is based on growth, which I would say in the West is is the primary um base assumption of our economies. So, you have this economy that requires growth, you are the elites making policies, you probably you're going to be pretty pro people um coming into the country. Uh then, if you have stats like this in London, over 60% of the people are born to mothers that are foreign, all of a sudden, uh I I hate even using the phrase replacement theory, but it's like that is a fact that is happening, that the people that are locally um that are already there our birth rates far lower. And so, they're just you know, again, trying to use very neutral language. It just begins to shift. Yeah. I mean, I And again, this uh interesting um thing that I need to learn from you about, which is the difference between uh the United Kingdom and Europe. Uh and and the United States on the other hand. So, the UK and Europe, predominantly, um if you looked at the genetic profile of people living in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, 1960s, a very high proportion were descended from people who had been there 6,000 years ago. It's now clear that uh the these Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, didn't really change the gene pool of Britain very much. Uh the United States is different. Uh and and that's what I never quite understand in the great replacement theory. I mean, the great replacement in the United States was of course the great replacement of the Native American population. Uh and and therefore, as a European looking at the US, I get a bit confused. I mean, what exactly is it that people are anxious about? Their own parents great grandparents great grandparents were immigrants not that long ago. So, presumably, that's a little bit different to uh what's going on in Europe. it is. So, this feels to me like the uh a phrase I will say a lot, this is just the architecture of the human mind. So, Dave Chappelle has a quote that I think can be broadly applied, which is everything is funny until it happens to you. Uh when you're the person coming in and conquering and getting the land, hey, it's all good. When you are the person being conquered, it's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." And now all of the sudden, it's all breaks all the time. What the hell is happening? And um so that to me, I understand. I think it is just going to be the natural human response. I would have expected Native Americans to be wildly pissed off as people roll in and start taking their land, and I would expect them to, as they did, fight to the death, to feel betrayed every time a treaty was made and then broken, to have long-standing generational bitterness over what happened. I think we see the exact same parallels between the Israeli Palestinian conflict. All of this feels like, yeah, this is pretty predictable. Um the things I want to tease out are how much of the future can we see by saying, "Okay, I understand the human mind. I understand how it reacts to this stuff." And I would like to predict as many of the second and third-order consequences as possible. So, um I think now would be a good time to plant a flag in populism. What is it exactly? And if I am correct that populism happens when you feel And in fact, there's one more thing I have to put out there. Uh I have a feeling that people only conflict ethnically once you have cultural assimilation. If you don't have cultural assimilation, then people will fight at the level of culture. So, I would not expect ethnically diverse UK to um be where the battle lines are drawn. I think people that sound and act, {quote} and {quote}, British will all get along, no matter what they look like. Uh and then people who don't and are espousing foreign values, that's going to be where the line of conflict is. And so to me, immigration is really a bigger question of assimilation, which is why it probably feels slightly different in the US because I think the US ethos largely is one of, "Yeah, give me immigrants. I'm here for it, but when they roll up, they better feel American. So, they better want American values. If you roll up and you feel like you're trying to shut down the things that are classically American, then you're going to have a problem. That would be my gut instinct. Yeah. And the question of what's American, of course, changes over time, making it even more complicated because I guess if you uh part of the kind of Brahmin elites in Boston in the mid-1800s, you would have seen a lot of the immigrant communities turning up in the 1800s as not being classically American in the way you defined it then in the 1850s, 1860s. Um whereas whereas what's classically what's classically American now, I guess, is the kind of post-war American vision. No doubt. And you will when you look back in history, you see the pockets of discrimination, violence, et cetera when they are perceived to be the other, right? That they haven't assimilated. And look, that's complicated. I know I'm sort of rounding things just to be able to they didn't just to make it even more complicated, it's not just that people assimilate. In assimilating, they change the culture. So, uh it's partly because of immigration that the culture of the United States in 2024 is quite unlike the culture of the United States in 1954 or the culture in 1924. And the same will be true in Britain. It's not that there's uh a given thing called British culture into which people assimilate. In the process of assimilation, British culture itself shifts and alters. So, for example, you would expect um in 20, 30 years' time, very different views of the monarchy, the royal family in Britain. And that would be largely driven by people coming from other countries who didn't grow up with this royal family, who think a lot of British traditions are a bit peculiar. And a a of those traditions will be stripped out. And the same will happen in the United States. If you end up with a much larger population, many of whose parents, grandparents grew up in Latin America, you will expect a a more hybrid culture to emerge, which will have features which were more associated with Latin America and not associated with the America of the 1950s. Mhm. Yes, and uh final button I'll put on that is uh no one likes change or the vast majority of humanity don't. So, in any transition everyone goes through a transition, which is one of the big questions of my life right now. I've started paying attention to world affairs. Is that just because I'm about to turn 50 or is something actually happening right now that's worth paying attention to? I I have a hard time parsing those. Um but it does feel like there's there's a larger wave of immigration, which I think is explained by economics. We've already been through that. Uh so, I do feel like this moment is going to be more contentious, but I think your point is well taken that these moments are occurring basically at all times. Uh and even if it's just generational, where they're assimilating new values, you're you're always going to see this movement. Okay. Uh plant a flag in populism for me. What is it exactly? Populism, um at its core, is a very exclusionary worldview, by which I mean the populist claims to speak for the people against the elite and usually claims that the elite is somehow foreign or alien to the country. So, when a populist says I'm speaking on behalf of the American people or the German people, in actual fact, often their supporters are barely 50% of the population, but that's not how they present themselves. They don't present themselves in a pluralist way. They present themselves as having a monopoly on truth and identity. And people who are against them are not perceived as fellow citizens who have a equally valid but different perspective on things. They're perceived as people who are somehow traitors to the cause. Um so it's got a sort of monopolistic structure built into it, and that's what makes it so dangerous. That's why often you'll see populists challenge the Constitution, challenge the rule of law, challenge checks and balances because it's a mindset that assumes that they represent, in inverted commas, the real people, that they're right and everybody else is wrong. And therefore, anything that stands in the way of doing things in the way that they want, constitutions, amendments, courts, legislatures, are to be swept aside because they are defying the will of the people. And of course, this is not just phenomenon of the right. I mean, you this was a very, very, you know, apparent in the Bolshevik Revolution in that created the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks were, you know, a tiny proportion of the Russian population, but they claimed to be the people and proceeded to rip up everything that stood in their way in order to fulfill the will of the people. And anyone who opposed them was a traitor to the people. If they actually don't have a majority behind them, why does that rhetoric work so well? Um Well, I think it works partly because it gives a great deal of confidence and energy to their supporters, gives their supporters a degree of moral legitimacy that they might feel they lacked if their leaders were just saying to them, "Well, you know, we've got X million votes and they've got a few more votes than us and we're going to take it in turns." That removes uh some of the Yeah, some of the authority which is necessary for the extremism. It's also that they're able to draw on very deep roots of nationalism. Blood and soil. If you say you speak for the nation, you know, you are making America great again, for example, right? You have a whole language which is not available to your opponents. Your opponents may be talking about, I don't know, tariffs or economic growth or how to fund a Medicare system, but you are saying, "I am making my country great again." And and the whole structure of that creates a very different type of politics. Okay, so I have a thesis on why this works. Let me know what you think about this. I suppose I should call it a hypothesis. Uh the reason that the strong man works, the reason that populism works even when they don't necessarily, in the beginning, represent the majority of the population is that um leadership works because the average person feels lost and confused. They are looking for short hands, always. Th- This is just, again, architecture of the human mind. And a strong man will intoxicate people with certainty. They will say, "This is the problem. This is what we're going to do about it and your life is going to be better." I think it only works if there is underlying um frustration in the populace, even people that would not have, at the beginning of this, identified. There's It could be as subtle as a malaise. Uh things aren't growing. I don't know why it feels like it's going to be worse for me than it was for my parents. Things just seem harder. But if you have that open door of frustration or malaise, and you come in and say, "This is why you feel terrible, and this is what you need to do about it." People feel seen, they feel heard, and now they have an answer. They don't have to think for themselves, they just have to identify with that person, and it's like, "All right, well, things suck now, so I'm going to get on board with this." Imagine breathing through a straw while trying to run a marathon. That's what life with sinus congestion feels like. And I have battled with allergies for years. That is why I'm excited about Naväge nasal care. Naväge uses a patented system of saline flow and gentle suction to clear your nasal passages effectively. It works in as little as 30 seconds. It's completely drug-free, using only purified saline. The design is straightforward. If you're ready to breathe freely again, here's an exclusive offer for Impact Theory listeners. When you order a Naväge starter pack, you'll also get a free cleaning kit. This offer is only available by going to navage.com/impact. Again, to order your Naväge plus free cleaning kit, go to n a v a g e dot com slash impact. Again, that's navage.com/impact. Yeah, I think that's right. that? I I I think it's right. I think any successful insurgent movement, and and populism by its nature is quite revolutionary. Always has to draw on a deep um sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. I mean, the only way you can run a campaign against the elites or the establishment is if the elites and establishment are associated with something that seems to be failing people. Now, some of that is objective, and some of that can be made up. Like, so objectively, the 2008 financial crisis was a humiliation for the credibility of markets and exposed profound inequalities inequalities between people's incomes, inequalities between people's wealth, inequalities between regions, right? Difference between what it's like living in Flint, Michigan and what it's like living in Massachusetts. The Iraq and Afghan wars were complete humiliating catastrophes. Three and a half trillion dollars is three and a half thousand billion dollars was spent by the United States and its allies and they achieved nothing. Invaded to get rid of the Taliban, spent 20 years in Afghanistan, handed the country back to the Taliban again, right? So, these are objective facts. But, it's also true that such facts exist at many other periods and the question is, are the political entrepreneurs able to exploit people's frustrations successfully or not? So, the Vietnam war was an equal catastrophe. But, it didn't lead, in the way that the Iraq and Afghan disasters did, directly contribute towards the rise of populism, right? Now, why is that? Partly because of social media. I mean, I think one of the most dramatic changes in our lives has been the introduction of Facebook and Twitter and indeed the algorithms that underlie Google and the way that those have contributed to very, very particular ways of perceiving the world. Contributed to polarization, continued contributed to the erosion of borders, uh contributed to the dissolution of traditional news networks. And and that's necessary because people in Flint, Michigan were always in a worse situation than, you know, people living in fancy parts of Boston. But, it's the modern world makes that much more visible to people. And I think And also gives the populists an opportunity they didn't have before. Donald Trump, for example, whatever you think of him, was an immense beneficiary of the world of social media. Because he's able to benefit from the fact that if he says something provocative, in the 1950s, he wouldn't really be reported, right? The New York Times could ignore him, the television news anchors could decide not to cover him, he wouldn't really go anywhere. As soon as the world of social media exists, if he says something provocative, he gets a double benefit. He gets the benefit from his supporters who say, "Whoa, this guy speaks the truth. He's given us permission to say things we haven't been able to say." But, he also gets the benefit from the people who are outraged by him. Cuz the people outraged by him are also viewing his things, retweeting his things, sharing his things. And a whole revenue stream comes in and an attention stream from support and outrage, which wasn't possible uh really before this stuff really gets going, I guess, in about 2014, when smartphones become very, very available. And when a critical mass of people are are using these platforms. So, this contemporary populism, yes, it has some relationship to fundamentals, but it's much better understood as a product of a changing media culture. Do you think that social media is a net benefit or a net detraction from society? I think politically it it probably has been a net detraction. I think there's huge things that we all enjoy about it enormously. I think it gives us wonderful access to things with incredible ease. You know, I spend a lot of time on on Twitter X, and like many people there are all kind of wonderful rabbit holes that I go down which I wouldn't have been able to go down uh you know, 15 years ago, right? I can look at cute cats. I can work out. I can follow people with strange theories on medieval Britain. I can [snorts] look at lovely architecture. I can learn how to follow a new diet regime, right? All that stuff I'm able to do. But when Elon Musk decides to take control of a platform like that and then say to people in Britain on X that there is a civil war in Britain and is able to guess it to a very, very large number of people instantaneously this claim. And is then able to do something that wasn't possible in traditional media, which is to have 500 replies which seem to validate the post from people saying, "Oh, yeah, there is a civil war in Britain. I looked out the window. Look at this, the whole thing's out of control." It has a power um which simply didn't exist before. I mean, it there was no equivalent to this. There was no way of doing that before. And that that's what the Arab Spring it was kind of the first hint of. Now, when it happened in the Arab Spring, did that feel positive or negative to you at the time? At the time it felt positive. At the time I felt right the way through that social media and the internet more broadly was a wonderful, liberating phenomenon that would allow us to speak directly people to people, that would push out the control of the old hierarchies and elites that would allow people to topple dictators, to self-organize, um and it took me some time to understand the risks associated with that. What are the risks? Well, the risks are exactly these examples I've tried to give from Donald Trump or Elon Musk of being able to mobilize very, very rapid, very aggressive, very exclusionary movements often on the basis of very scant facts and getting visibility and support and enthusiasm for projects which previously would curate I mean previously when news anchors dominated, when uh the newspapers dominated, there was a normative structure, there was an ethical structure embedded in the editors that chose what to display to the public and what not. And often that put an emphasis, for example, on the truth. I mean newspaper editors uh you know, of course we're always vulnerable to advertisers, they were always um you know, flawed human beings, but they had some notion of public service, and particularly publicly funded broadcasters, you know, the NPRs, the BBCs of this world believed they had an obligation to the public to try to check whether what was being said was true. But as those business models have been destroyed, and they have been destroyed, they've been destroyed so that these platforms now are struggling to compete with a YouTube influencer who can make more money than the New York Times. Then it it becomes much more vulnerable to all these things we're talking about, polarization post-truth populism. Do you think the um general public is better off with a curated reality? Well, it's a it's a really good question. I don't know how I work my way through that because you can see so strongly the arguments on both sides. I mean, on the one hand, you know, I was the beneficiary of social media. When I ran to be Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I was able to come from nowhere and use social media to develop a momentum I would never have been able to find before. I was able to get huge support for my particular program in a very unusual way. I was able to circumvent the traditional party structures. I was able to crowdfund and do all that kind of stuff. And of course, people like me who tend to be on more on that side of politics, we got very excited by uh President Obama's ability to do that. You know, again, difficult to imagine his campaign in the old world of the Democratic Party machine. On the other hand, uh if we are really losing any sense of truth, if anything goes, if we can no longer really rely on serious journalists with serious editors fact-checking, we find ourselves in a very odd world. Yeah, this I think is going to be uh one of the defining arguments of our time because to your point, you can see the arguments on both sides in terms of uh man, the very sense of what is real begins to break down when you just have a wall of information coming at you. Uh you need algorithms to parse the information in some way. Uh even time-based display of the information is a decision, right? And not necessarily the best decision, and it will be gamed and all of that. Uh people will start posting right when they think the right people are waking up. I mean, it's it is uh Uh, it's really interesting, but I think it forces everybody to lay bare what their base assumption is about the what I'll call the the people. And I have a base assumption that authoritarian rule is the only way to enforce a controlled narrative, even if you're doing it for the what the quote-unquote right reasons, that you you will eventually have to do it through violence. And given that, my fear is always always that the authoritarian government is far more terrifying than the mob. Meaning a bunch of people let loose going crazy, saying whatever they want to say. But I guess what where you where the founding fathers would challenge you is they would say that that isn't really or shouldn't be the choice. That the idea of representative democracy was supposed to be finding a middle path between authoritarian despotism on the one hand and what you call the mob on the other, right? That these structures, the Electoral College, the Senate, and coming out of that things like the presidency was supposed to be ways of um giving some voice to the people, but balancing that voice with other things. Balancing it with the Supreme Court that was supposed to be composed of highly educated jurists, balanced with a carefully written constitution, an executive balanced with a legislature, and elected senators and representatives who were supposed to be using their judgment and conscience, not simply acting as a transmission mechanism for whatever their voters said. Because um if you are Thomas Jefferson thinking about [snorts] government, yes, you want to get rid of the king. You want a revolution, but you you do not have much confidence in the idea that a kind of free-for-all is the way to go, that things need to be curated and organized. Just as I suppose, you know, this conversation we're having follows certain kinds of rules, certain kinds of expectations. You know, you very courteously let me speak. I casually listen to you and ask a question back. Um the but the risk in the public sphere is that those rules disintegrate. And you end up with nonsense. Yeah, I I aggressively agree with the founding fathers. I am completely uh enamored by what they put into place. I don't think that they could have ever conceived of social media, and it is very possible that they would have put different things in place had they been able to predict that. But I look at the first and second amendment, and I say, "Yeah, word." Like, that's exactly how you have to be thinking. So, uh the first amendment says, "You, barring an incitement to violence, you have the right to say anything." And that has to be a as a matter of priority, as the first amendment, that has to be protected. And I can go into reasons why, but I'm actually more interested to hear if you agree with that or not. But the first amendment, and then followed up with the second one, which is the right to bear arms. And once you understand that the founding fathers were far more worried about the government becoming tyrannical and you needing weapons not to protect against your neighbor going crazy and coming and stealing your chickens, though yes, that too, but that it's really about the government becoming problem. So, to your point, they're trying to get away from the king, authoritarian rule. They're like, "We don't want that anymore." But the people like, "Hey, you don't just want anarchy." Love the third way idea. But there I think there people need to, at at a minimum, have a hypothesis of mind reading into the founding fathers and why they would put those as one and two. That was mine. Um how do you take that? How do you feel about free speech? Well, so I I think the the uh idea of free speech is a a smart and good one and I think it's good that you added short of inciting violence. I mean, we've just had this in the United Kingdom. The people who've been prosecuted have not been prosecuted for um sharing ideas. They've been prosecuted for defining how to attack immigrants and hostels. Telling people to wear gloves, telling them what fuels to use, telling them which hostels to attack, right? The these are not masters to um expressing their views. Right? The people who've been put in prison been put in prison for stuff that you would be put in prison for before social media. I did that that breaks your first amendment. Um on the second amendment, look, this is a difficult conversation. But I come from the United Kingdom. In 1960s, we had about 100 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United Kingdom. And you had about 15,000 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United States. Fast forward since we're in about 2 and 1/2 million people have been killed by gun violence in the United States. We are now in a situation where in the United Kingdom, we have about 65 people killed a year through gun violence and you have approaching 45,000 people killed a year. In other words, the number of people killed a year in the United States by gun violence has tripled when it's almost halved in the United Kingdom from a very low level to begin with. In fact, it's such a low level that it's pretty difficult writing a crime drama in the United Kingdom. there's just not enough people murdered to be able to generate the plot, right? I mean, it's it's our average uh crime dramas are basically body counts is mostly people that would be killed in an entire year. Um so, I think that um the founding fathers' anxiety around despotic government is a good thing to be worried about. I think they were right to be concerned about it, but I also think that governing involves balancing very different considerations. It involves balancing the ways that societies change over time. Uh technology changes over time. You know, would they have taken the same view of an assault weapon as they would have a musket, which is what they were talking about? Would their views of government change once governments have the ability to surveil in the way that it does now? Would their view of government change if they saw that 2 and 1/2 million people have been killed by gun violence since the 1960s? I don't know. But I I certainly think that one of the things that we have to do is is remain alert to the possibility that the world changes, things change. And the things that we once believed, um we may change our beliefs on. I mean, I think a classic example in Ireland would be the debate around abortion, which has changed very dramatically in the last 40 years. From a very strong Catholic opposition to a compromise. And the United States is now this very strange outlier. I mean, I had a you know, I was a member of the Conservative Party in Britain. I had a friend come to one of our Conservative conferences, who's an American. Couldn't believe the fact we didn't mention abortion at all in the entire conference. It's just not a subject. Nobody talks about it, nobody's interested in it. We have a pragmatic compromise on how many days and the number of days beyond which you can't have an abortion and the number of days within which you can. And it settled the issue basically permanently in Britain and Europe. And in the US it hasn't, but that that that I don't think is telling you much more than that cultures change and they change at different paces. That is for sure. Um talk to me about social media. So, practically speaking there is a collision as an American that certainly seems true. As an outsider looking at the UK it seems even more true. As an outsider looking at Canada it's downright terrifying. Um what do you think should be done with social media? Should people barring a direct incitement to violence um should there be controls? Should the platforms be held accountable to what people publish on their platforms? Uh what's your take on that? I don't know. I mean it's it's a very very difficult world to get into this. A part of the problem is there is so much money involved. Uh literally some of the very very wealthiest companies in the world are on one side of this debate. And their entire business model is predicated on these algorithms and on this particular way. I mean, what's striking is that and I I'm being a bit provocative here towards you and many of your listeners, right? But what's striking is that some of these companies, my sense is, you know, Google began quite idealistic. There was all this do no evil stuff going on, right? And back in 2014, it still seemed plausible to me that these companies believed they had an ethical purpose. It feels to me as though the only thing they care about now is profit. And they have developed these unbelievable marketplaces, advertising models, algorithms that allow them often to take 80 cents in the dollar from an entire industry. Now, to what extent can they then be trusted really to think clearly about these things? I just had a, you know, I just had a a long conversation with the guy called Nick Clegg, who's very senior at Facebook. And I like Nick very much, but can I really believe when he's earning as much money as he is that he's going to be clear and honest with himself? I don't think he's necessarily lying to me. He may be lying to himself about the negative impacts of what's going on. So, I don't know how you get through this, but one thing I know for sure, these algorithms are not sharing information on the basis of what they believe is true. They're sharing information on the basis of what gets attention, which they can then sell to a company that wants your attention in order for you to buy their products. And think about X, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, go on. Go on. Go on with that. I was just going to ask, what do you think about X's community notes? A step in the right direction, fine. If anybody pays any attention to them, but often the community notes come when the damage is done. I mean, Elon Musk had got 45 million people viewing a post claiming that Keir Starmer was trying to extradite people to a small island in the South Atlantic before any community notes get on. I mean, why did Donald Trump just produce in this debate this strange story about immigrants eating cats? Because he operates in a strange bubble full of other people who believe this. Why do they believe this? Well, they believe it because it's incredibly easy now to share this kind of information. When he said it, I guess millions of people listening will have been like, "Damn right." Because they somehow have seen this stuff and he's seen this stuff. But these algorithms are not are not acting responsibly. I mean, they're not they're not attempting in any way. I mean, Elon Musk is a very interesting example of this. You would have thought that as the owner of this company uh he would bother sometimes to check what he puts out. The fact that he can't be bothered to spend a little bit of time checking whether the article he's sharing is true or not, checking whether or not the historian he's endorsing has said that Adolf Hitler was in favor of peace and Winston Churchill was the worst war criminal of the war. I mean, what's going on? I mean, it's this, I think, that's that's that's that's bringing it to a head. That previously, if you were a regulator in Europe or Canada dealing with these companies, you could convince yourself that they were well-intentioned and that when they got things wrong, it was by mistake. So, the model was predicated on the idea that you would go to Facebook or go to Twitter and say, "I'm sorry. You've posted something dangerous or untrue." And rely on them to take it down. But we're now dealing with a situation where it feels as though I'm afraid with Elon Musk that he's not well-intentioned in that way. That he's testing it. He's pushing the boundaries as hard as he possibly can. And that you're not going to have a very productive conversation with him saying "I'm sorry, what you just said was completely untrue, unbelievably dangerous, causing huge chaos on the streets. Could you please take it down?" The likelihood is he'll say no, that's my free speech. I'm allowed to share lies if I want. And that changes the whole equation. Um in what way? Well, because if 44 million people suddenly hear that, for example, I mean, how did these riots start in Britain? The riots started in Britain because a post on social media claimed that a Syrian immigrant who's named got off a boat in the last 12 months and killed three young girls with a knife. Right, this was completely untrue. The girls were killed by a Christian who'd been born in the United Kingdom. Immediately, people are burning down mosques. And they're burning down mosques cuz they believe it was done by a Muslim. And then, being spread very rapidly around social media, is details on other mosques and other community centers and other asylum seekers. And quite quickly, the government begins to lose control of the narrative. Then, if other people are tweeting out you know, "The government is trying to crush you and they're going to take you off to the South Atlantic and put you on an island in the middle of nowhere." Right, more and more people come out on the streets fighting against what they believe is this kind of crazy repressive government that's going to deport them from the country. So, I mean, that that was a very, you know, obvious example to us a few weeks ago where lies spread on social media quite literally led to asylum seekers trapped in a burning hotel with hundreds of people outside trying to set light to it on the belief that these people were somehow responsible for stabbing young women who they hadn't stabbed. So, your own uh countryman Orwell was very aware that there was always going to be a battle for the truth and that humans could be manipulated pretty easily uh with fear being one of the greatest weapons. Um that is where I start to get worried because it it social media forces us to confront some really stark basic assumptions. So, for instance, can the populace think for itself? If you don't think that the the average person at large can parse through the information that's coming at them, then it's like we have to shut this down for the good of the people. If you believe that uh someone somewhere when you put that kind of control on is going to have to decide what is true and that they are likely to become corrupted by power if nothing else, um you run into a situation where you have tradeoffs before you and you are simply choosing the lesser of the bad tradeoffs. Does it not seem that way to you? I think you're I think I mean I think where we probably disagree is I think you you you're imagining a a little bit like you're mob against uh authoritarian rule. You're imagining two extremes and you've lost sight of the of the reality. I mean the reality is that each of us, including you and me, are fallible humans. We often will end up believing things that aren't true. And you know, we you and I will be quite proud of our ability to pass information and judge, but we'll be aware that we've got it wrong. We've been wrong about friends, we've been wrong about world events. Um we're susceptible to certain kinds of authority. Our memories are very weird and flawed. I mean, we we are strange creatures. And so I I don't think one wants to I mean, I'm very sensitive to this as somebody who was an elected politician. I mean, obviously as an elected politician, it would be uh complete career suicide to suggest that the public could ever be wrong about anything. Because your opponent would immediately say, you know, you're you're contemptuous of the public, you don't believe in democracy. My view is that generally the judgment of the public's pretty good. It's generally why I like living in a democracy. I think people are pretty sensible. Do I think that the decision to vote for Brexit was the correct decision? No. I think it's been very damaging for the United Kingdom, but the majority of people voted for it. How do I then deal with that? I deal with that by saying to myself, well, we live in a society where there's lots of different access to information, lots of different levels of education, lots of different data out there, and it's a pluralistic society, and people have the right to choose to leave the European Union if they want to, even if I disagree with them. But that's about defining uh a a terrain of rules. It's uh defining a stadium within whose bounds you play. People can choose within that stadium to leave the European Union. Right? They can choose to put taxes up or taxes down. They cannot, in my view, choose to burn down hotels with human beings in them. And we have I mean, our whole system is about drawing boundaries and lines. And the the risk of where the real techno-optimists and apostles of social media are going is that they're forgetting how many rules there are already in our societies, how our whole society depends on rules. And they're asking, for example, for the rules for one particular form, forgetting that our entire lives, liberty, and happiness depend upon systems that constrain in innumerable ways what we can do. Okay, so I think we actually agree on all of the pieces, but we disagree maybe on the conclusion. So, um we're fallible. So, my whole my whole world view is predicated on my agreement with the following statement. So, it's interesting that I think there is some area though where we end up drawing something different. So, we're fallible, 100%. That that is why I am so terrified of the government because a an authoritarian government is a government that says we know best. And I'm saying, "No, no, no. You're just made up of fallible people uh who believe things that aren't true, who have memories that are just wildly um manipulated by themselves, by others. It's the way that our minds work is utterly fascinating. Um so, all of those things that make us a slightly scary creature, I agree with all of that. And I come back to you, and I suppose the question that I asked about community notes is because that to me feels like the only real solution. So, I get it. There are going to be times where 45 million people, 100 million people, 200 million, whatever, they see a lie, a blatant lie, and that will do just unimaginable damage before it's corrected. But, and um I have not been able to articulate to you in this that I look at the two extremes so that I can find the third way. I'm just trying to see what the realities of the compromise are, not because I'm saying, "Oh, you just go to one of the other." I'm saying, "If you understand what the tradeoffs are going to be, hopefully you can find a better way." But when I look at, "Oh, okay, uh millions, hundreds of millions of people will see a lie and that lie could have tremendous consequences. So, what do I do about that? Do I step on that from the top down or do I let the people battle that out in the arena of ideas?" I think I was pretty agnostic until COVID happened and all of a sudden I saw people that had very credible voices uh in terms of epidemiology being told to shut up because what they were saying didn't match the narrative and if you believe in the scientific pro- uh process as I do, you break that process and so you are breaking the ability to make progress when you tell people that certain things are beyond the pale and cannot be discussed. There are certainly things beyond the pale that you can't do, but in terms of like, "Hey, here's my hypothesis on what is happening here?" Again, I'm not saying that you should be able to advocate for violence or anything like that. I'm just saying, we when authoritarian rule comes in to say misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, those are all completely off limits, you get a totalitarian state. So, I mean, I've I you know, I agree and sympathize a lot with what you're saying. I mean, I my version of your experience during COVID was my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, I served in those places and I saw very, very clearly people pursuing completely crazy policies that made no sense at all. And I saw politicians and generals and an enormous amount of the public getting behind projects which were just simply crazy. Wasting lives, wasting money. I mean, just And so, it's very easy on the basis of that to think the establishment, the elites got no idea what it's doing, and we need to blow up the whole system. The question is, what is the alternative? And I don't think that what we're describing with COVID or Iraq and Afghanistan or indeed what I saw as a somebody working in international development, where I saw so many ludicrous, stupid, wasteful projects. Um I I don't think those things are examples of authoritarian rule. It can feel like it, because if you disagree with the conventional wisdom, it it can feel pretty authoritarian. But it's much more like what happens if you're in a company where the board has got the wrong end of the stick. These are much more the problems we face in our societies are much more about optimism bias, groupthink, risk aversion. So, if I think about, you know, what's happening with COVID in the United Kingdom, it's not exactly that we're living in a dictatorship. It's more that a bunch of slightly complacent politicians and scientists, for for reasons which are often to do with their psychology rather than the evidence, right? End up going down a particular path. And that's all of history. You know, we It's now clear that the economic policy of the 1970s was largely ludicrous. The economic policy of 1980s was pretty ludicrous. And that a lot of the things we've done and believe in are pretty ludicrous. I happen to believe that there's a form of this groupthink and optimism bias happening with social media. That in 20 years' time, people are going to look at it, and they're going to look at it in the way that they look at Philip Morris cigarettes or Perdue Pharma. They're going to literally say, "What were these people thinking? How did they think this was normal and okay? But, this isn't authoritarianism. This is um This is groupthink. It's optimism bias. It's financial interests. It's And And And that's And the way to deal with it is not through um the radical uh opening of every narrative. The way to deal with it is through checks and balances. The way to deal with it is through an independent judiciary, through independent universities, through electoral cycles where people can get rid of their government every 4 years, through um breaks between executives and legislatures. I'm much more confident that the answer is the structures of liberal democracy, not the kind of that we're going to stop authoritarianism by unleashing the power of social media. I think the power of social media is much more likely to lead to the collapse of liberal democracies and the development of authoritarian states. It's much more likely to embolden populism, much more likely to embolden uh people who are able to exploit attention and advertising models to take power and then challenge the constitution. Very interesting. If I'm right that that only happens when the tinder is dry, meaning the economics are bad, there's an underlying sense of frustration, um yes, I can see that, but I think that's just you're supercharging the um the voices to your point. But, if the voices have nothing to rally in the populace's soul, I don't think it will take hold. When things are growing and people feel good, you just don't end up going down that path. but, my answer to that is I'm I'm more gloomy than you are. I think it's very rare in societies for things to be growing and for people to be feeling good. Our experience as humans is one of perpetual dissatisfaction. I mean what do we meaning when we're saying things are going well? Right? If you're somebody on a low income in the United States, you now live in a world in which even if your income was going up by 10% a year, you know, you're still getting by on 40, 50,000 dollars a year and you can see on television people living lives where they don't have to worry about their mortgage, they don't have to worry about facing their grocery bills. You're stuck in Flint, Michigan and you can see the Kardashians having a good time in California, right? You you we cannot as societies produce the situation where everybody or even the majority of people are going to feel that their lives are great. People are always going to be incredibly conscious of the un- the injustice of the world, the unfairness of life. Most people will always feel that. And therefore we need to design systems which are realistic about that. Which find ways of explaining that you know, in in the United Kingdom that we can't pay for our health service without paying much more tax. That we can't expect to clean up our rivers without investing far more in our water system. That we're not going to be able to have an economy that grows as fast as China. That we're not going to be able to run our hospitals without having immigrants. I mean and and the tinder will always be there. All societies are full of tinder. I mean, there may be rare exceptions. It's possible that in the United States between about 1955 and 1975 you had a a rare period of 20 years where the tinder was a little wetter and where people were not as enraged. But the general condition of most of our societies, doesn't matter whether you're in China or Indonesia or Britain or the United States, is a lot of very angry people, understandably, because life is extremely unfair. That is uh certainly a sobering uh perspective. So, if we are living in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, the Tinder is already there always there, social media gives voices that create this rise in populism, what do we actually do? Well, um I think on we have to up the quality of the non-populist politicians. They need to have policies which are credible and serious. They need to be able to improve people's lives. I mean, they're never going to be able to deliver everything that people crave, but we certainly should be able to deliver better health care to people in the United States. We should be able to deliver better infrastructure. We should be able to deliver decent economic growth, not Chinese-style economic growth, but we should be able to deliver 2 or 3% economic growth. And we should be able to have more equal tax systems. These things are not beyond us. Secondly, I think we need much better communication. I think one of the problems is that the Hillary Clintons of this world came across as humorless and stiff and out of touch. And if the center is to regain a bit of momentum, it needs to develop a sense of humor. But finally, we need a sense of moral purpose. We need to explain why the populist critique is not just intellectually incoherent, but morally wrong. Why pluralism matters, why democracy matters, why equality matters, why these things are precious ethically. So, that's on the side of the politicians, but then I think there is probably also room room for more regulation of social media as part of the story. I see um I mean, this is a very classic view, but I see all of history, all of human existence as a feedback loop. Uh and quite frankly, a positive feedback loop, so that the output of the system itself causes the system to move faster. And when I look at um the economy, I don't know if you how much you know about Ray Dalio, but um looking at his study of empires rising and empires falling, and it's all essentially a cycle of debt. Um there seems an inevitability. I know you and I slightly disagree about um Although, I will say in your answer, it sounded to me like a lot of things that you're saying that we need to do, better politicians, better economy, uh more humor, these are all things that that put a little moisture on the tinder. And I think that's right. I think that's the right answer. Um but it does get at, I think, my stance, which is, okay, the tinder's always going to be there, but it it does differ in degree of dryness. Uh and so, there are times where it's more likely to spark than others. So, um I think the debt cycle drives a lot of this, and that we are now, obviously, the UK is an empire that has, I mean, I would say it has collapsed, certainly. It's it is not what it was when the sun never set on the British Empire. And the American Empire feels like, to use Ray Dalio's language, we are mid to late stage five, and stage six is total collapse. Um in this moment, do you see do you perceive any inevitability? Because that is certainly how it feels from my perspective. it depends depends what I mean, I think you're right that debt is a big problem, and we don't talk enough about debt, and we don't talk enough about the way that money works, and we don't talk about what happens when debt is canceled or forgiven, and what that can mean for countries, too. Um but it also depends, when you talk about the collapse of empires what you mean and what you're worried about. So the United Kingdom no longer rules an empire. Right, it's a small island in the Mediterranean. Sorry, small island in the Atlantic. I don't know why I put it in like, wow, you guys upgraded to the Mediterranean. Nice. We've upgraded. It's must be the weather here. It's climate change making us seem more Mediterranean. Um uh but the average person in Britain is much better off than their grandparents were. So at the period where Britain ruled a quarter of the world life expectancy was in its early 60s. Uh average incomes were down at 5 or 6,000 pounds a year. People didn't have indoor lavatories, indoor toilets. Um they didn't have electricity, many people. And now we live in a world in which we no longer get to send white guys off to rule large chunks of India. But the average person in the United Kingdom is far better off materially than they were in the 1930s, 1940s. So what are we talking about when we're talking about the collapse of the American Empire, right? Perfectly plausible that within 20, 30 years time nobody in the Congo is going to be interested what the United States has to say about the world. Perfectly plausible that nobody in Japan or South Korea is going to rely on the United States to save them. But that doesn't mean that the next generation or the generation after might not live lives which are longer, happier, more fulfilled and richer than those of us that are alive today. Yeah, the the only thing that I lose sleep over is that the transition moment is almost always devastating. So, the long arc of history, it won't matter, it'll bend towards justice, things will get better for everybody, but that will be cold comfort to the people that have to live through it. But, setting that aside cuz there's some other things that I want to talk to you about. Um decentralization being one of them. This is something you've put forward as a way to improve politics, to get out of some of the quagmire. And then your recent work on um direct giving. I think these two ideas are are really powerful. Well, let let let me talk about them. And they're related in a way. So, decentralization is about understanding that often local people know more, care more, can do more than distant officials. That you're much more likely to come up with a good solution for your neighborhood than somebody in Washington. And that there's another great benefit for decentralization, getting power down to a local level, which is that you can end up with a lot of it. You can learn from each other. Rather than having a single centralized structure, different states do different things and they learn from each other, compete with each other. I also think that at a time when we've lost faith in democracy, the closer you put government to people, allowing them to vote in their local area and get engaged in shaping their local area, the more faith and trust they redevelop in the democratic system. I think our our societies are basically too big. Our governments are too far away. And that a lot of our problems come from that. The same would be true with industrial strategies. I think that an industrial strategy for California is much better developed in California than in Washington. And probably much better developed in northern California than in California as a whole, etc. On direct giving, I mean this is something which is even more radical, but I used to run a $20 billion dollar year international development program. We're literally giving 20,000 million dollars a year to people in developing world. It's one of the largest development programs in the world. And we achieved so little. And one of the reasons we achieved so little is that we were obsessed with the idea that we knew best. We were coming in to an African village and we were going to teach them something. We had this great phrase, "Give someone a fish, they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, they eat for a lifetime." And we developed these mad teaching people to fish programs, which ended up consuming 95% of the budgets and ending up with almost no good results on the ground. I then had the privilege a few years ago visiting this nonprofit called GiveDirectly, which was giving cash. That's all it was doing. Turning up in a village, it was surveying people and then it was transferring to their phones, cheap feature phone, about $900 in cash. You go back a few weeks later, the entire community is transformed. People have new roofs, their kids are in school, they're eating better, there's electricity, there's water supply, there's latrines. The whole place has been completely transformed. And transformed for, I would say, about 5% of the cost that it would take you to do it through a traditional program. Whereas you could do 20 times as many villages as you could do through a traditional program. And why? Well, because it turns out that cash falls like uh kind of water on a mountain landscape. It fills every crevice and cranny and it adjusts flexibly to different people's lives. It adjusts the fact that you may have a different business idea to me or your neighbor may be focused on health care and someone else focused on education or you may need to fix your roof. I've already fixed my roof. I want to buy a cow. You want to get a bicycle for your business. I mean, and the cash allows you to do that. Whereas the traditional program comes in and says, "The one thing that matters in village is water." Or "The one thing that matters in this village is education." Or "The one thing that matters in this village is a road." Or "The one thing that matters is roofs." Or "The one thing that matters is sanitation." Right? It's It's nonsense. Every house is different. Every need is different. And if you give cash, something very interesting happens. People begin adjusting to each other. Right? You and your neighbors buy a bunch of bicycles so you can take your products to market. I open a store fixing bicycles. You buy a cow, I open a store selling veterinary medicine for cows. Or I set up a yogurt business processing the milk from those cows. There's amazing multiplier effects that come out of cash. And above all, I think just to finish on that, it gives dignity. It's saying that the poorest people in the world know more than you or I do about their village in Malawi. The idea that you or I have any idea what their lives are like, what their needs are, what their priorities are, is just madness. We can begin to understand what they're worried about day-to-day. And it would cost us an incredible amount of money trying to work it out, most of which would be wasted. All right, it is an utterly fascinating um idea. So, as I try to wrap my head around what this uh is at its essence. So, it's This is going to sound weird, but it's basically a decentralized centralized bank that is creating money out of thin air from their perspective, right? So, it just shows up in their bank account. So, we're creating money, we're distributing it. Now, given that that must always happen to jump-start an economy, whether you're digging gold out of the ground, or you're harvesting seashells, or salt, or whatever. Uh you have to create a thing that is the money that people want, and therefore they will do a thing. It allows people to specialize. I mean, this just is how economies are born. But, the economy must become at some point self-sustaining, or you get what we're having here in America, which is why I think we're in so much trouble, which is just printing money. But setting that aside, how does this how does direct giving, if you look at it like that, jump-starting an economy, how does it become self-sustaining? Well, what one thing is that what we're increasingly doing is giving one-time payments. This is not a UBI. So people are not receiving this money every month. It's a one-time capital investment that is going into getting that business off the ground or fixing that roof and and it's understanding, as you say, that often what's holding people back is capital, not knowledge. The people in this village have a very good idea uh what goods they can sell in in the market town. The problem is they're 20 miles away from the market town and they don't have a bicycle to get to it. Or they did just don't have a plastic bottle into which to put the yogurt that they're milking out of the cow. I mean, there's very simple things that they're often lacking. So it it's recognizing that's what's holding or you know, you're running the a little shop in town, you don't have any money to buy any biscuits. I think these are pretty straightforward things or you can't buy in bulk. A lot of the uh issues is that one of the reasons the extreme poor in Africa uh end up in a very bad position is that they can't buy a packet of 12 bits of toilet paper. They they have to buy it in tiny, more expensive quantities because they don't have the money to to do any kind of bulk buying. There's no economies of scale for them. Once that's going then, of course, it isn't about cash. Once the motion of the economy for the extreme poor is going, it's then much more about the economy as a whole. It's about is there a decent government? Where's the tax rate? Where's the infrastructure? Are there roads? Are there schools? Are there clinics? What's your tariff and trading position? And and and so the cash is not about kick-starting the whole economy. It's about allowing the extreme poor, and even within a country as poor as Rwanda, we're talking about a third of the population, not the majority of the population. Allowing them to access the infrastructure and the economy that's out there. Interesting. You said this is not about jump-starting the whole economy. I'm very surprised you say that, meaning there's already an economy there or Yeah, so let's take Rwanda. Rwanda's got a gross domestic product of about $10 billion a year. And the extreme poor are living on about $2 a day. And there's probably about uh say 2 million of them in that country. What you're talking about is giving the money to the people who are literally struggling to work out how they're going to eat for the next 2 days. And allowing them to access services which often already exist. There's often already a hospital or a clinic, but if you are on the edge of starvation, you you just can't get to that hospital or clinic. There may be a school, but you just can't afford to send your kids to that school because the basic money that you might even need to buy a textbook or the decision that your child's not going to be hoeing vegetables but go off to school is too much for you to make. Um again, Rwanda, it's got an insurance sector. It's got call centers. It's got software developers. It's got uh people employed as teachers and doctors. I mean, there's lots of stuff happening in the economy. The problem is these remote villages. And and that's where the $900 suddenly transforms somebody's opportunities and ability to better themselves. Okay, so what is it? Just uh not to pick on Rwanda, but since you brought them up, Yeah. why doesn't Rwanda do this themselves? Is there corruption in the system? Is there something broken? Like, why didn't this problem resolve itself? Well, fundamentally cuz the country hasn't got enough money. I mean, the the even with a GDP of 10 billion dollars, it's it's got a population of about 10 million people. They're living on the the average person is living on about a thousand dollars a year. And the tax revenue that you can generate from that is not sufficient to be able to deliver 900 dollars to a family in extreme poverty. You would need to bring in the money from the World Bank or the IMF or some other donor. And it's not a loan you're giving people. They're not paying you back. It's a one-time cash grant. Um so uh without the taxation revenue, without the ability to borrow, um you simply don't have the money to give these people. Okay, so is this uh just trying to find an analogy to help people wrap their heads around this? And And I'm asking this in the spirit of the following. I don't think the average taxpayer cares. So, they're like, why am I going to pay for this? Like, if the Rwandan government isn't able to do this for their own people, why am I doing this? And so then it becomes a humanitarian thing. And I think people will get some people, obviously, will get behind like, okay, cool. I'm willing to do this. But they're going to need to really understand how this at some point become self-sustaining. So, if the Rwandan government is already not collecting enough taxes to be able to do this with their own populace, and this isn't jump-starting the whole economy, but attaching them to the economy, does that like make this all work? Or are we going to have a brief generation where things are nice and then it just falls by the wayside? No, I mean, one of the reasons why we're quite confident about this is that some very, very rigorous randomized controlled trials have been run where you compare the groups that receive the cash with the groups that don't receive the cash over 3, 6, 9, 12 years. And we're seeing even 12 years into these programs the sustained impact of a few hundred dollars given 12 years earlier in terms of people's savings, their investments, and above all their incomes. And you're seeing those people becoming taxpayers, and you're seeing those people contributing in a productive fashion to the economy. So, the evidence is is very very striking. Um in a study in Kenya, for each dollar going into these villages, there's $2.50 of benefit for the surrounding area. This is partly because people are starting from a very low base. It's not I I think you were getting at this a few minutes ago. Capital in this context goes much much further than it would in somewhere like the United States. It partly because things much cheaper, partly because uh what is a dollar for us will end up being worth about a hundred dollars for the people that are receiving it. But also that there is so much untapped potential, so much untapped labor, so much untapped resource. You know, there's quite literally in Zambia there is um I was with a farmer in Zambia. And I he said, uh I've just uh got a house for my son. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, well, come with me. And literally he just walked into the bush, chopped down some trees, and stuck up a mud thing. Now his son was cultivating what was wasteland. And still in an enormous amount of Africa, there's incredible land there which hasn't even begun to be cultivated. So, the small amount of money that you bring in which allows somebody to get that hoe, buy a few seeds, get a little bit of fertilizer or pesticide, plant a few trees, produces impact in a way that it never could if you were you know, giving the money to somewhere, I don't know, in Kansas where it's much more difficult for somebody in extreme poverty to put their money to work. If you guys have 12 years worth of data on this, where can people learn about that? So, if you go to givedirectly.org, they are fantastic and I think very honest and one of the reasons I I support this organization I'm not paid by this organization, but I support this organization is because they're wonderfully honest. And they've got a lot of research. They talk very openly about things that go wrong. They talk about when they're surprised by less impact. They talk about when they're disappointed, but they also talk beautifully about the things that have worked and how much they've learned. And they show right the way down to the detail these academic papers. There'll be more than 350 studies now. And these are rigorous models on the way in which you do a medical trial in the way that you compare the control group and the treatment group. How does this compare to what Bill Gates is doing? He is doing something very different. Bill Gates is concerned with health and what he really wants to do in many contexts is eliminate diseases. So, he would like to eradicate polio. He'd like to end malaria, for example. He'd like to vaccinate people. And that really is what he cares about. If I'm looking at somebody in a village house and you give them cash they get to choose what their priority is. Am I going to fix my roof? Am I going to start a business? Am I going to put my kids in school? Am I going to vaccinate myself? That's not the Bill Gates view. Bill Gates view is this person should vaccinate themselves. The money is going into vaccination. And my problem with that and I'm not succeeding in convincing Bill Gates this and this would irritate him if he listens to your show is that what you're often doing is letting people live longer lives in extreme grinding poverty. You're not giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. They're just living longer. Now there's something to be said for living longer, but I'm not sure that the weight that he puts on living longer as opposed to living a shorter life in better material conditions is correct. Right. Talking to you has been utterly fascinating, man. I cannot thank you enough for your time. Where can people follow along with you? Well, uh thank you. Um so, uh couple of things. Um do go to the GiveDirectly website because I'm passionately proud of them. Um uh I I tweet Rory Stewart UK, and I've just written a book called Politics, uh which is out in the US called How Not to Be a Politician. I love it. Awesome. Thank you again so much for joining me today. Everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you liked this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. First off, the um the financial cliff that we're rapidly driving off uh is is pretty terrifying. Um there you know, it's not just the $35 trillion in debt or the fact that um that entry