The Truth Behind The Fall Of The UK - Rory Stewart

you've just come back from Afghanistan what is the atmosphere like now after the last few years since the Taliban took over what's it actually like on the ground well I I think the first thing um is just that it's surreal so I was in Afghanistan first when the Taliban were in their last so they they ran the country in the late 1990s through to September the 11th and it was a time when it was one of the most I guess sort of shocking governments on Earth there were public executions in the main stadiums Kabul the capital city was a ghost town there were very few people living there very few Vehicles half the buildings were still in Ruins from the Civil War and uh they were hanging televisions from trees I mean they were they were on a campaign against any kind of image so they were literally you could see television kind of suspended from trees then we invaded Afghanistan and I walked across Afghanistan just after the invasion so I walked from the West to the east of the country and I saw a country slowly emerging from the Taliban I stayed in a lot of village houses along the way the US and its allies then spent $1 A5 trillion dollars that's one and a half thousand billion dollars in Afghanistan trying to build a nation build a democracy and after almost exactly 20 years there they pulled out so having invaded to get rid of the Taliban they pulled out and handed the country back to the Taliban again so I turn up uh and I'm turning up the airport that used to have kind of big pictures of hammed kazai who was the um who was the usbank president now of course no such pictures at all um you suddenly see everybody's return to wearing traditional dress so you used to see a lot of people in t-shirts and jeans now they're see back and Shaak kames very few women on the streets uh the government is basically run by religious religious leaders by clerics by priests and um but security is much better I mean that's the thing that people don't talk about it's much safer than it was for 20 years so I was able to travel up into this because well partly the Taliban don't get any marks for this it was partly because they were doing the bombing and the fighting and the killing and now they've taken over there's no much reason for them to do that anymore but you can now travel up and down the country from one end to the other safely and that makes a huge difference to average Afghans because you know tens of thousands of people were killed during this war killed not just by the Taliban but killed by US troops British troops Afghan troops so if you were in the front lines down in southern Afghanistan it it was a horror show your relatives were getting killed all the time by either side it's a Civil War and now it's now it's peaceful and that that shouldn't be underestimated I mean I think many Afghans will say okay we don't like the way the Taliban are behaving we don't like the way they're treating women we feel a real absence of freedom but my goodness we're grateful that we're not liable to be killed at any moment so interesting it's so interesting to think that 20 years two decades all of that money all of that effort lives time resources that could have been spent on other things came back it's like The Alchemist by Paulo qu he could have just come back and dug in the the yard outside of where he first started yeah exactly like that it it's it's mindblowing and if you're looking for a symbol of how the West got overconfident and how it went wrong Iraq and Afghanistan where we spent over $3 trillion $3,000 billion and achieved close to nothing I mean these were failures Beyond imagining I mean you can't think of a bigger failure than to invade a country get rid of the Taliban spend 20 years there and then hand it back the Taliban again it's just definitional failure what's going to happen in the yeah no no but I'm going to just think if you trying to understand one of the reasons why people have partly lost faith in Liberal democracies why populism is on the rise that story is an important part of that because it was a real humiliation of the elites of the governments of our militaries of what we were telling our publics yeah I would say the last especially the last sort of five years but certainly the last 10 to 20 years has been a very inescapable regular face planting of people who should be knowledgeable uh in power uh someone that you're able to give a a sense of sort of trust and faith in like it's just been mainstream media government officials individuals within government the systems NIH C CDC wh you know every single organization and every single individual within them it's this odd sort of configuration of uh individual uselessness and systemic sort of incompetence that's just been shown over and over and over again and then we ask questions about you know why have you got a populist more populism On The Rise why is it that people are turning to uh certainty as a proxy for expertise as opposed to expertise as a proxy for expertise well in a world that's chaotic where you really struggle to find Trust someone that comes along and says this is the way it is this is the solution all of the chaos that's out there I can Wrangle it into a couple of different variables why that's seductive it gives you this sense oh finally finally someone can tell me how this works because I know that we messed up in Afghanistan I know that we messed up in Iraq and I know that we messed up with Co and I know that we messed up with the blah blah blah it doesn't surprise me no no you're right and um but I guess there's part of us that uh I mean we're also smart and we also know that people who come to us and say I'm going to sort it all out don't worry there are two things we need to do it's all going to be fine are generally bullshitting us and I think one of the challenges I I've just written I I was a politician for 10 years and I've just written a a book which in the US is called how not to be a politician because it's about trying to describe why politics doesn't work and a lot of this is about understanding that we don't think about politicians the way that we think about people in our own families or the way we think about somebody we might be in a business with you know if you were running a small Family Pizza Restaurant and the person that you had as your manager spent their whole time standing up saying look I don't know anything about pizzas but I got this this the two things we're going to do we're going to you you'd get a bit fed up right you you begin to begin to wonder about what's going on in fact a lot of our politicians kind of remind me of sort of kind of unreliable uncles in our families that we're aware of these kind of bullshitting figures that kind of float in and out usually having got themselves into horrible debt with chaotic family lives holding Force at the family dinner table very confidently I had I don't know whether you saw the episode but I had Dominic Cummings on the show recently and he gave uh how' you say a less than flattering assessment of the competence level inside of government uh you know there's uh the the Peter Principle that uh people will be promoted to the level of competence that they're maxed out at and then no further which is why everybody that gets promoted eventually ends up sucking at their job and uh it just you know we we watch shows like the thick of it you know or vep or or you know whatever West Wing and you think hey I that's a dramatization of it but then to to realize that the real world is uh maybe more accurately represented by a sitcom than it is by the news um so just draw the line for a second between try to explain to me as somebody that's seen both the inside and the outside of government why is it not attracting more competent uh upwardly mobile sort of aggressive go-getting people like is this something systemic is it due to the the constituent Parts is it the pool that they're drawing from what's going on I I think there two things I think one of them is the quality as you say it's it's a pretty horrible job it's an extremely unpleasant poorly paid job where if you're a public politician you're being abused on social media all the time you're working very very long hours and people are very angry with you all the time it's very demotivating so people don't want to go into it but I think there's a second problem which is that the culture is all screwed up it would be like being a kind of even if you were quite brce and competent be like being a bright young teacher joining a completely dysfunctional failing school with a kind of crazy head teacher and all the other teachers who've kind of opted out or or or being a kind of keen young police officer joining a completely corrupt Police Department I mean politics is so rotten and what I found is you know the people that came into politics with me who were elected to Parliament with me many of them have been quite impressive in their lives before politics this is what I think Dominic Cummings underestimates I mean there's nothing wrong with their IQs they'd often done well at school they'd run big successful businesses they'd been decorated Colonels in the army they were successful doctors I mean they were people who were perfectly able to do other stuff but once you're in it's such a kind of demoralizing horrible environment it's incred inedibly cynical nobody cares about people basically laugh at you if you try to be serious I mean to return to my analogy be like being the kind of eager young teacher turning up in the kind of with the exhausted older teachers and being like here are my plans for how I'm going to turn around the whole school and everyone just laughing at you the whole system is basically just about getting yourself promoted and fighting the opposition and all the energy goes is is that bottom up is that emergent that's just sort of the um the cool culture inside of govern yeah exactly that's it is the cool culture you're you're exactly right so listen if you sit down uh again my my book is a lot about trying to describe this if you sit down in the tum of the British House of Commons but the same would be true in the senate or congress in the US and you try to have a kind of earnest conversation about child tax credits or what's happening in UK everyone kind of laughs at you what they want to talk about is they want to gossip you know who's had a scandal in the newspaper what are the opinion polls showing who's up Who's down who's going to get promoted who embarrassed themselves last week they they they basically think that if you try to talk about um policy if you try to talk about ideas to change the country you've kind of missed the point you're you're kind of boring or you're a loser or you've sort of um yeah you've missed what the game is the game is I mean we we can and this is where Dominick coings is wrong it's worse than he thinks it's not that they get promoted to their level of competence and uh they're promoted so far above their level of competence I mean Liz truss who became our prime minister in the UK for 44 days she was unbelievably incompetent even when she was a very Junior Minister she was in a catastrophic secretary Junior Secretary of State and then a catastrophic foreign secretary then she became prime minister it's not that she'd done well in the previous jobs it's that nobody cares nobody's looking at their performance nobody's analyzing what they achieved and and there's a way of relating to this in the US if you think about the fight between KL Harris and Donald Trump very little of it is actually about analyzing what they did in office so little you know KL Harris is doing well at the moment but nobody has kind of forensically scrutinizing what actually did she do as vice president what did she actually do on immigration policy on the border and nobody supporting Donald Trump is looking in a lot of detail into What policies he in I mean so it's very strange I mean it's not like um normal bits of Life normal bits of life I guess if you're investing in a company maybe you kind of look at their performance look at their products but nobody does that with politicians it's all about the marketing it's it's it's marketing with nothing behind it this allergy to earnestness of taking things seriously of doing the job that you're supposed to be there to do really scares me uh I found I I basic basically kind of bucket people into either Earnest or not Earnest serious or not serious that doesn't mean the serious people can't have fun too but they take the things that they're supposed to seriously and that's very scary that's scary to think and the reason it's even even more scary is that it's this sort of bottomup emergent milu this soup that the uh politicians are swimming through because what's the intervention to be able to change that you take one person out you put a good one back in they immediately become spoiled you take three of them out put them back in they immediately become spoiled there's a great a great stat that one of my friends George found which was the head of UK cyber security head of UK cyber security the job was posted online can you guess how much the annual salary offering for the head of cyber security for the entirety of Great Britain was no 65,000 £65,000 to go up against the CCP and Russia and Iran and hackers and the dark web 65,000 no it's amazing it is amazing and um no again the reason I enjoyed writing the book but also the reason why my colleagues have been very angry with me is that I'm trying to just describe it from the inside and the way that you might describe what it's like working in a police station I'm trying to describe how people talk to each other their sense of humors their clothes the fact that everybody kind of smells the stale coffee covered in kind of aftershave if they're kind of conservatives the fact that I me it's just just the shoddiness and and and and then I try to talk a little bit about the states as well because I think it's very when American politicians have read the book they recognize it it surprised me I thought maybe this is just telling you something unique about Britain but they're like oh wow yeah and in some ways our situation is even worse because we're spending 4 and a half hours every day making fundraising calls so we've got no time to think about politic we're just trying to bring in the money all the time talking about what it's like on the other side of the trenches I haven't been back to the UK since Christmas this year it's the longest time I've ever been away and the scenes that are coming out and the stories that are coming out of the UK are I know it's it's like an embarrassing time to be a a British person I think you know we're not exactly covering ourselves in glory no matter what side of the fence you sit on I don't think anybody's particularly happy with the way that things have been responded to the way that stories are going around whether it's protests or anti-protest protests or people and the way that they're talking online or the police and them arresting people for the things that they're saying online it's just it really does sort of feel uh like end of days stuff at the moment what is the atmosphere in the UK like at the moment well I think just to take take lessons back to to the the fundamental story which is the thing that started this all off I mean there was a horrible atrocity where a 17-year-old boy went into a group of young girls and killed three of them with a knife and immediately this story went out that he was a Syrian Muslim who just arrived on a boat illegally uh within the last year and people then went out and burn try to burn down a mosque now this is literally like uh the Middle Ages this is what used to happen is what happened to Jews in York in the kind of early Middle Ages somebody says a baby's been killed oh it's the Jews let's go and burn down the synagogue right of course it turns out that the 17-year-old who did the stabbing is a Christian he's not a Muslim and he's born in the United Kingdom so absolutely nothing to do with musl Muslims nothing to do with people who just got off a boat right so that's the first thing I mean it really reveals something very very disturbing about the way the British public is acting and thinking and now and of course the fact that there been going on in some ways versions of this I'm familiar with you know I wouldn't be surprised if this something like this happened in Afghanistan or something like this happened in many of the countries I've worked in the world but I'm pretty surprised something like this is happening in Britain right this is a and and of course second thing is that people were completely caught off balance there's been no major rioting as you know in Britain since 2011 when there were major riots in London so for 13 years the police have not had any experience of dealing with major riots right so even the way in which they were handling these things didn't quite work didn't quite deploy the right forces you end up with 50 officers ending up in hospital then you've got the social media thing right you've got Elon Musk somehow failing to notice that something he's retweeting is a deep fake claiming that the British prime minister is going to deport people to the Faulkland Islands this small island in the South Atlantic and punishment for what they're doing and he he retweets it and he gets whatever it is 1.3 million likes and then someone has to point it out to him and he takes it down a little bit later without any apologies right so there's all these different bits of you know hatred of Muslims going on an atrocity going on genuine concerns about immigration problems with police management challenges around social media which are not just about the UK which include people like Elon mask weighing in I mean it's it's it's been a a terrifying situation and I also think I mean I it's a difficult thing to say but I believe the British prime minister was not good enough at getting out on the ground early and communicating in a direct relatable way to calm people down how so I felt that he was a bit um he was a bit wooden he he gave some interviews and he sounded I mean he's serious guy but he think it's a time when you need to be at the ticket tape you need to be on the streets show yourself there and you need to have that that ability to communicate which which um which is one of the few things you do expect from a politician one of the interesting conversations I've had a lot this year again you learned so much about your country by not being in it so oddly enough I've actually learned probably more about the UK being away for it for eight or nine months than I ever did the fish swimming through water so to speak and um yeah in retrospect one of the things I realized is we look at the UK as a very Advanced pretty rich country I think it's you know top 10 in the world it might be the sixth largest economy in the world but when you actually look at it it's not the sixth largest economy in the world London is the sixth largest economy in the world and we have a very rich city inside of a pretty poor country and I'm going to guess that when you're walking through whiteall or you're like having a chat in Westminster the the issues of Middlesboro or or Carlile or Rochdale probably aren't top of anybody's agenda and I wonder how much the kindling uh for everybody has been lit because if you're outside of the M25 [ __ ] you yeah it's a big problem I mean I was a member of parliament for for Northern constituency near kala up on the Scottish border and 350 mil away from Rondon and it's a different Universe uh people are living on much lower incomes they're living on much a very very different life but it's even more extreme if you get to these areas that you're talking about the Northeast which are ex mining communities that have lost their mine ex industrial areas that have lost their factories areas that really since the 1980s have uh had serious problems with unemployment and other things that have gone along with them too it's a place called easington Cy that I was in recently and it's um that that really is a place where there's been serious issues around substance abuse unemployment Etc and you can see it in the housing it's not it's not unique to the UK right this is you can see this in West Virginia you can see this in Tennessee you can see this in bits of Ohio you can see this in a lot of France too just an hour north of Paris you can get some pretty bleak communities uh and it's the problem these big huge mature democracies um when we look at their economies we forget the fact that there are huge inequalities so in the UK between London and the southeast and the northeast of England in the in the US between I don't know Flint Michigan which is pretty poor and where I am talking to now which is Massachusetts which is pretty pretty wealthy so the getting getting on top of these things is incredibly important and of course the communities living out there and this is one of the things that drove brexit it's one of the things that is the core of a lot of the Trump vote White more working class less educated communities with fewer economic opportunities in areas which are doing much less well than they were two or three generations ago feel democracy is not delivering for them feel that all this fantasy stuff they hear about all the promises that were made all the stuff they see on the screens and they feel that their country is unrecognizable how cognizant do you think the people are in those areas because I grew up in Stockton on te's which is tside I spent 18 years there I was in full-time education there for you know sort of 13 or so of those State primary State secondary State six form and then went to Newcastle University um I recognized during the videos of the Middlesboro riots um I recognized uh it was it was actually really activating for me uh it took me back to being in school and there's this very unique category of behavior which is I called workingclass rage but it's just like an ambient discontent but it's not I don't think directed with this lineage you know the string isn't drawn from the politicians promised us this and we haven't had any after school clubs and um the park hasn't been cleaned in so long um and I think you know with the benefit of of perspective you can look at these groups and you can say this is because we need more initiatives for such and such and whatever it might be but when you actually get there on the ground it's just angry dissatisfied people who don't have particularly many opportunities it's this odd it's like being rained on and you're wet and you go well where's the where's the wet come from you go I don't know you know like a million individual raindrops none of which I actually distinguish do you understand what I mean yeah yeah I I totally do um I totally do and what you've described um is something that we should be more honest and open about because what you've described is something that doesn't have um easy instant Solutions I mean it's a it's it's a real problem that um if it were just that the local park needed cleaning up you clean up the local park but if what you're talking about is really a ambient rain you know Million Raindrops that is much much more difficult for people to address and turn around I mean let's look at the most extreme examples I don't know whether you have visited um some of the poor and Native American communities but if you look at the Lakota community in South Dakota or if you look at Aboriginal communities in Australia right and then you're getting right off onto communities that are very marginalized very vulnerable very high instances of substance abuse huge instances of unemployment and a lot of governments occasionally trying to help I it's not that there aren't people there there aren't initiatives there are initiatives there are people there are well-meaning people there's there's money going in that but as you say It's A Million Raindrops you know sometimes um you get the sense that particular communities because because societies are going through something that feels like a a trauma and it's not fixable just by you know doing up the school doing up the park Afghans I guess are not a million miles away from this so I was in Afghanistan visiting a a charity which my wife and I set up uh 20 years ago now and we work with some of the poorest people in in Afghanistan we worked initially in a very deprived area in the center of the old city of Kabul and we restored people's buildings built a clinic built a primary school supported traditional Crafts People exported their crafts abroad and I'm very proud of what we've achieved I mean I think we have made a real difference to people's lives their life expans they're living longer they've got clean water they've got electricity they've got jobs they can be proud of but I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that there are so many things they are still angry about and I have every reason to be angry about I mean they they they are living in an unbelievably difficult situation of course we're in a world in which people it's very easy to be very very aware of how other people are living you know you you can be in the back end of of of um the Democratic Republic of the Congo and you can be watching TV showing you what's happening in California or Japan and you can just be like it's going on so I I I suppose what I'm getting at is it's very difficult for politicians to deal with this because what the public often sound as though they want is for somebody to say I've got this these are the two things I'm going to do you the situation in Stockton is a disg Grace and the answer is education education education well the situation Stockon is a disgrace the answer is jobs I'm going to create jobs or situation disgrace it's about infrastructure we got to get the road and rail infrastructure going on housing got to create affordable housing rate and delivering it in our societies turns out to be unbelievably difficult the legal barriers the bureaucratic barriers the financial barriers I mean it's just getting anything done and so that's why politicians feel freshest and most convincing when they're either lying to themselves or lying to the public there's I'm feeling this sort of odd symmetry between what's happening inside of Westminster and what's happening in these workingclass communities because you have uh this combination of top down and bottom up you have these um incentives and uh these restrictions and and they create kind of the environment and then this begins to almost be taken and run with by the participants by the people that are inside of that and the same thing seems to be happening both ways and like I say I know this I know this from from living there for 18 years that people don't point to individual instances maybe in the same way that the politicians don't rail against the actual uh restrictions that they have you know like a crab breaking out of its shell that's not where the problem lies they've become their own uh hostage taker in some way you know they've got Stockholm syndrome for a kidnapper that's no longer there and uh well I think we all I I think most of us have got doesn't matter whether you're talking about communities in Stockton or politicians or people working in big businesses or stressed doctors in a hospital most of us have got Stockholm Syndrome from a hostage taker that's no longer there there's a lovely phrase from the English po William Blake where he talks about mind forged manacles but we we we as humans we we surround ourselves by um we are incredibly tribal we're incredibly conventional we're incredibly conformist um we tried to read rules and follow rules which turn out to make no sense we're formed by cultures that end up with us doing completely bizarre things you know if you were to take the 500 people who are trying to burn down a library uh which is what we saw last week in in Britain and ask them why they're doing it a lot of them wouldn't necessarily have much of an answer for you I they might make a joke about it or they might talk about you know let me tell you the four things that you people would say right one person might be like this is about taking back control of Our Lives the second one would be like [ __ ] the Police the third one would be like there's too much immigration the fourth one would be like yeah I just thought it was a bit of fun you know I'm a teenager I turned up saw this going on I thought get involved right um but none of these things are complete descriptions of of why we're doing things or our motivations we don't understand ourselves very well I don't understand myself very well and mobs crowds my God don't understand themselves very well I mean crowds just just go I heard you uh I it made me think earlier on when you were talking about this uh the one policy solution like the single antidote Keystone uh lynchpin myopia that basically every person believes that their thing is the thing this is what I've stood for this is what I know best it also always happens to be the thing that have expertise in you know it's never the thing that they don't have expertise in that's the most important thing well you're in the center of this aren't you I mean you're in the center of you know California where literally everybody wealthy person I meet is like Tech the whole world will be fixed by Tech I can you know sort out poverty in Africa through AI I'm going to you know whatever it is right but Doo you're right if you're a football player you're like the answer is Sport you know yeah yeah um so obviously a lot of problems being placed at the feet of immigration at the moment uh that's that's the hot talking point in the UK from your perspective what are the uh big problems that need to be tackled in the UK over the next over the coming years well immigration's one of them because immigration is a problem not just in the UK it's the problem in France the problem in Germany it's problem across Europe it's a problem in the US I mean look at the Trump musk interview that just happened a couple of days ago most of the time he's talking about immigration with a with a reason right voters really care about immigration so uh and denying that is a very foolish thing for politicians to do having control of your borders are perfectly legitimate it's not something you should be embarrassed about right our societies which are wealthy societies with big welfare states cannot function with open borders cannot right and it's it's a sort of we're lying to ourselves if we um try to convince ourselves that somehow being a good person is about pretending you're in favor of open borders the second thing is understanding that in Britain a lot lot of the anger is about people crossing on boats from France and it's completely duffed you know people in France are not at risk of their lives again we have to be honest about this France is a safe country right you're not getting on a little rubber dingy sailing across the channel from France to Britain because you're about to be persecuted or killed you you you're fine in France now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking after people who genuinely are at risk of persecution I think we can do that we can be reaching out to female judges in Taliban Afghanistan and bringing them over but we should be setting a a a reasonable uh Target a number you 0 5% of our population year so let's say 30 40,000 people a year that we'd bring to the United Kingdom in the UK us could be 150,000 people a year who are genuinely suffering um and we should share the burden right we should have all the countries wealthy countries agree how many they're going to take and we could make a real difference that problem over 5 10 years but that's completely different from the question of how you want to run your economy and who you want to run your economy and there the problem in Britain is that we're getting older when the welfare state was set up by Lloyd George we had one retired person for every 20 working people we've now got one retired person for every three working people and so we've brought in one and a half million people to the UK in the last two years legally legal and we brought them in because basically our hospitals our care sector our Farms simply could not function without labor and that was brought about by leaving the European Union right instead of young Europeans coming and to fill those jobs and then often going back to their own countries later we shut off that whole Supply so if you're running a restaurant in London you no longer have some young Spanish or French person chopping the vegetables right You've Got to Now bring someone in from Nigeria or Bangladesh or Pakistan specifically recruited for that job is this not a birth rate problem as well it's a birth rate problem as well yeah um it's a birth rate problem as well and uh yeah yeah but then it's it's unbelievably expensive having a family and having kids and governments you know they can give a bit of money to help you but if you think about it wal the uh Governor moner is is talking about the fact that he's given $1,500 a year tax credits it's just $1,500 a year it's not going to make any difference to anyone that does I mean kids are expensive what's your thoughts you mentioned uh Elon Musk and Trump I haven't had time to watch uh that interview I hear that it was a technical car crash but I I don't know about the content yet um one of the other real hot topics at the moment has been the digital hate act the uh attention of police to people who have posted things online that have contravened a particular law I think that there's talk about the EU and some government bodies pushing for Elon to face criminal prosecution for some of the things that he said on Twitter what do you make of this obviously because America everybody is Downstream from America in in one form or another and free speech is so you know endemic to the conversation over there um that kind of sort of trickles down into all of the discussions but then not every country does have those kinds of protections and then we you know we do have this concern about fake news and deep fakes and and the ability for people to be scared about what say and self-censoring and all of that what do you make of the sort of EU and government bodies calling for criminal prosecution for Elon well I I think the the the thing to understand is that all this stuff is just applying laws that have existed for decades I mean it's always been a criminal offense to incite people to go and burn down a mosque long before social media right if if you were out there sending Letters by carrier pigeon telling people to go and burn down a mosque inite in a mob to commit a criminal act um helping to plan and organize a criminal act is is Criminal uh now there's a so I think I totally sympathize somebody's just been imprisoned uh given a three-year sentence for telling people to go and burn down an asylum hosel and giving them advice on changing their gloves and what kind of materials to use to set the Hostile light I mean I think he should be in doesn't matter whether he's doing it on Twitter or whether he's you know doing it by sending them letters right I think the more difficult thing is the disinformation stuff I think there although it's horrifying that uh a woman was claiming that a Muslim had done this when she he hadn't done it right um it's much more difficult to to to prosecute her because she just could have got the wrong end of the stick you and it's I don't think it's and and we don't really have for for good reason there's not much precedent or laws around um sending people to jail for spreading false stories it's going to be a flash point I think it's going to continue it's going be it's going to be a flash point and and but and Elon Musk wants it to be a flash point I mean that's the other interesting thing because up till now these big companies have cooperated so Twitter under Jack dors Facebook have always been quite happy to engage with the UK regulator or the EU regulator if there's something nasty online you know people are teaching young kids how to kill themselves or they're encouraging extreme fasting that leads to anorexia or there's incredible cyber bullying right these companies in the past would sit down and have a reasonable conversation and they'd take the stuff down so there wasn't really much problem what we now have is El is spoiling for a fight he's pushing the limit as far as he can and I don't think he's in the mood to take anything down because he sees any kind of compromise or censorship and that will then open a much more interesting question what do you do with a company that doesn't want to cooperate now theoretically you can find them 10% of their Global income theoretically you could shut down their platform theoretically you can hold them criminally liable I mean you know the law again if you can prove an a court of that a newspaper editor has encouraged somebody to go and burn down someone else's house they're criminally liable for that house being burned down so the question is could you trace it back to Elon Musk and say he's like a newspaper editor now his response to that is no no no I'm just this is a neutral platform I'm not an editor I'm just providing the opportunity for people to put the stuff out there but that's misleading because the algorithms right the algorithms we know uh Del deliberately encourage people towards these positions we could see this with January 6th great work by two New York Times journalists in the runup to the November election Facebook was promoting trusted news sources after the November election Facebook got fed up with that because they weren't making enough money they make money they get eye attention by people sharing more inflammatory stuff in like-minded user groups so they took off all those constraints and you can draw a direct line from that to what happened on January 2 so these platforms are not neutral their algorithms make decisions all the time and how they decide to arrange them what they decide to favor has a huge impact on our politics it's interesting that most people's views in the real world or if you were to do some sort of psychological profile of them even when it comes to politics and the most you know gregarious VI vifer of of uh of positions fall on some kind of bell curve right you have most people that converge toward the middle maybe there's a couple of little bumps here and there for micro communities and then the really extreme positions sort of tail out toward the side and then all that you need to do if you want to work out what it's like on the Internet is just take the graph and turn it upside down sure went up with a bell curve in the real world and a u- shape on the internet and um I think you're you know I I certainly know what you mean um the uh incentives online will always reward the most most inflammatory language the most simplistic take because Nuance doesn't go far it's not sexy it's it's it does it's not memeable it's not sticky right and it's and it's not funny and it's often not funny America great again coconut the the coconut pilled coconut Squad you know she it's brat summer all of that it needs to be simple yeah no no and and you know I've experienced this myself over the last few days if I post something um you know saying ELO musk as a wine car I can get you know I don't know 17 20,000 likes if I put out some Earnest message about how we can address extreme poverty in Africa and get about a 100 likes stupid idea that's boring don't talk about that exactly no it's it's it's but it's I mean it is so depressing you know you will if you're like me and you're the difference between trying to write a really serious article about something you care passionately about and then you put it up on the web and you know if you're lucky 10 15,000 people see it and I make some trite joke and like four or five million people are engaging with it I mean it's very it's a very strange world yeah there's a uh a fantastic Insight uh that I learned from a friend who said um where is it a dilemma of tweeting is that you're aware of accept ceptions and conditions to your statements but can't include them without turning an elegant aphorism into a clunky mess so you must choose between writing tinard garbage or getting torn apart by pedants in replies and quote tweets it's good it's good well that's I mean what what what your friend has put put their finger on there too is is that a lot of the attention comes from stirring up antagonism you know I'm pretty sure that I'm getting massive response to my uh attacking Elon mask not because everybody likes me attacking elas partly because people are so enraged and that's so much on his side that also drives up the number of people looking at me you mentioned before about the problems of inequality um but you know we're talking within typically our countries we're talking about Appalachia versus Washington DC we're talking about Stockton onz versus Chelsea how bad is Extreme poverty when we take a Global Perspective how how bad can it get around the world well that's a totally different universe and we we forget about this because we've been telling ourselves a story since the 1980s that extreme poverty was somehow disappearing on its own and that is definitely not true particularly in subsaharan Africa there were 170 million people living in extreme poverty in Africa in 1980 there's about 450 million living in extreme poverty in Subs Africa today so so the absolute number not proportion of people but the absolute number tripled and when we say extreme poverty we mean people who are struggling to feed themselves once every two days sort of people that I see on the Rwanda Bundi border who are living in a a Hut made of mud sleeping on a mud floor with a leaking roof with no toilet certainly no electricity or water supply with kids who are am I ated uh in filthy clothes uh unable to access water and soap to wash themselves excluded from school a single day of illness and removing what you might earn on that day the dollar or two you could earn in that day is the sort of difference between almost life and death so those those there are hundreds of millions of people living in that situation today and we can make the most incredible difference their lives I I I've been working with this charity give directly and they literally just give Direct Cash transfers very radical very surprising I me you imagine that people are going to waste the money and it's all going to go wrong but if I take that woman on the r of buy border give directly gave her just under $1,000 and the same amount to every other house in that very poor Village and the changes since three months were unbelievable because you're getting out of the way you're letting them do it it it's not some charity worker coming in doing it for them you're literally just giving them the cash come back 3 months later and you've gone from about a third of people with electricity to nearly 80% 3/4s end up with a a cow uh the roofs are all fixed everybody ends up with a latrina with with a lavatory uh School enrollment goes up people are eating twice a day instead of once every two days and it's if I think about it uh I'm a donor to this nonprofit if I think about it from my own point of view I give $700 to that lady and yes that's a lot of money but it's a lot of money that you can imagine spending on a holiday easily quite quickly right for her it is a total transformation in her life it's her first decent food it's her first shelter it's her first latrine it's the first opportunity to get kids back to school I mean you can make so much difference in somebody's life with what to us I mean one way of putting it is it is literally worth I think maybe a hundred times more to her than it is to to us so it's not quite that I'm I'm it's not quite that I'm giving her you know $1,000 it's like I'm giving her $100,000 and it's costing me a th000 m MH what do you make of the perspective that give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day teach a man to fish and he'll be able to feed himself for a lifetime well I it's a lovely phrase isn't it we all love it because it's got this great idea that there's this instant solution you just teach in the fish and boom no problem anymore they're feeding themselves for Lifetime not your problem and it's very flattering to us because it gives us the idea that what we're bringing is knowledge you know we're the smart people we know how to fish they don't know how to fish we're can turn up we teach them how to fish and life's going to be better but what I realized with cash is that it doesn't work that idea at all why doesn't it work well it doesn't work because firstly in many of these cases um people already know how to fish they just don't have the money for a fishing hook right what do I mean by that many of these communities as soon as you provide a little bit of cash they've all got the business ideas already they just want to be able to buy a bicycle to get their stuff down the road to sell it well they just want to be able to invest a tiny bit of equipment that helps them turn milk into yogurt I mean they they know how to fish they just don't have them the equipment right but the second thing which goes wrong with that idea is that every house is different right so you want to open a little yogurt business your next door neighbor wants to get their kid into school the woman on the other side needs some money for Health Care the woman on the other side TR to fix up a house the woman on the other side is trying to do a business selling banana juice in other words and cash allows you to do that cash Falls like rain on a mountain landscape it allows you to adjust to all these different things house by house individual by individual so in that case they they don't want to fish you know they want to open a bakery and then I think the final thing is of course somebody in that Community will put the money to you so much more efficiently right if it's their own money and they're fixing up their house they do it for a fraction of the costs that a foreign char would fix out their house for because they'd bring in their brother and their cousins they'd use local materials they it's it's a completely different world so until I'd heard you talk about this I'd always assumed that the again my uh undue faith in authority and the people that are supposed to know what they're doing uh i' always assumed that that's the that was the way to do charity well you know because what about uh expertise um and and understanding the best ways to operationalize this you know they don't have a they don't have a Gant chart they've not got a nice Gant chart that'll explain to them what needs to happen first and then after we've done that we can dig the well and we can so on and so forth but I realized it's like it's probably kind of a racist view to think that oh we we know don't worry the people in charge they'll fly in air condition plane they'll land and they'll know how to fix somebody else's Community better than they can it's this sort of oddly like self aggrandizing very solipsistic perspective that I know don't worry poor brown people we are here to tell you exactly how you should spend your time how you should your commity so two things there one of them is the massive vanity so I I you know I found this I had a businessman in in London saying to me no I don't want to give cash to these people I I want to share my knowledge and my business experience and I'm like what the f do you know about living in a small village in Malawi you sell sandwiches to Heath airport what are you going to do you're going to turn up in um but the second thing is is is just how much money we waste on all those things on our strategic plans our Gant charts our Consultants our training programs so I I saw this when I was the I was responsible for the entire British development budget so I was the Secretary of State for International Development I had a budget of $20 billion a year $20,000 million a year to spend and I turned up in one of our projects in Zambia and it was exactly as you say right we'd come up with this brilliant idea which was that the reason why girls were not going to school was there wasn't good sanitation in school when they were having their monthly period so if we could produce good sanitation facilities they'd spent another seven years in school we allocated 40,00 ,000 per school I turn up in the school and I'm like okay what's happening here right and there's a row of whel Land Cruisers and there are all these foreign consultants and Engineers coming out and they're showing me their strategic plans and their logical Frameworks and their consultation mechanisms and and then I say well can you show me what we've actually produced in the school for $40,000 and they walk me to the end of the school playground and there are two holes in the ground with a little brick wall around them and there are five red plastic buckets and I'm like what the what is this right literally the cost of that is I don't $1,500 maximum the bucket's $5 right what is this they're like well we did all these um plans and investigation and we decided the most sustainable way to do this is to make the girls take the buckets to the well 300 yards away and then they fill the buckets with water and then they commos themselves what what are you doing I mean this is a $440,000 project why didn't you just give $2,000 the head teacher you could have done 20 times as many schools and their response was well he might have stolen the money I'm like we stole the money we literally stole $38,000 out of $40,000 here and and and the local people know that they know this is a $40,000 project that has resulted in five red plastic buckets they think we're Criminal that's terrifying that is but nobody doing it thinks they're doing anything wrong they're all like I'm doing the monitoring and evaluation I'm doing the anti-corruption mechanism I'm doing the Strategic plan I'm doing the engineering design you know I'm doing the followup doing theity consult wasteful wasteful wasteful wasteful and at each level of that stage there is money just leaking out on another that needs to be paid for on another flight to get some [ __ ] consultant out there yeah but they don't think they don't feel bad about themselves right they're all like all their family members are like thank you for your service you're so wonderful you're working in Zambia in their defense they are doing something again though what this sort of odd it's this odd tension between that the system that you're working within and your desired I'm sure that the people that work for Charities and are going out to Rwanda Zambia wherever they they're not going out there going I can't wait to waste all of this money it's just end of course of course not and and it's partly that we're so risk ofers I mean it it's partly that we can't bear to trust people a lot of the money is wasted on endless follow-ups Financial mechanisms checks controls monitoring you know so huge amount of this money will be wasted on a visit in a year's time to check the buckets are still there do you know uh Rory Sutherland from ogal the advertising do you know who that is yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I do yes so he he has this great quote where he says nobody gets fired for hiring deite and his point being that people would sooner be uh wrong in a reliable manner than be right in a risky manner because if you mess up whilst hiring Delight you're not getting fired you're fine sure but if you take a little bit of a risk and you get it wrong it's like Rory steuart what what the hell were you thinking and so no so if you take this example the fact is yes one head teacher might steal the money right there might be a school that didn't end up with any buckets but I would end up with 19 schools with the buckets instead of one so in a normal business you can take risk you can fail but in International Development in Charities we don't allow people to fail we're so terrified and we put so many mechanisms around trying to ensure that nothing goes wrong that we end up wasting 80 90% of the money how big just going back to the stats that you mentioned at the very beginning how big of a deal is the overall increase because I hear about you know relative poverty's gone down poverty as a proportion has gone down climate related deaths have decreased by 98% over the last 100 years etc etc etc um and as population increases these numbers are going to go up how do you how do you sort of think about balancing those scales mentally you know there is more people suffering but proportionately less yeah yeah it was very difficult thinking about this I mean I think the fundamental answer is that when we were pading ourselves in the back and talking about the massive reduction in poverty a lot of it was about China China alone took 7 800 million people out of extreme poverty add India add Bangladesh these big populous countri countries and in Asia in particular took a lot of people out of poverty but in subsaharan Africa in percentage terms 1980 maybe 40% of the population was extreme poverty today maybe 37% of the population's in extreme poverty and it's tripled in in in absolute terms and in a way I'm less worried about proportions what I'm worried about is there are 300 million more people who can't put food on the table and we can fix it I mean I think the point about giv directly the point about Direct Cash transfers is the most useful thing you can do is send cash not be like I'm a world genius who really knows about whatever you know about you know I could be like I'm a real expert on podcasting so I need to go and teach the people in this Village how to podcast or how to sell sandwiches to Heath airport right no [ __ ] right they all they know much better than we do but also it's about dig it's about trust it's about saying I trust you I believe that you know much more about your own environment than I do if you think about it with um back to I don't know Appalachia or Stockton on te's or whatever if you imagine the government saying would you like imagine you're running a small business in the High Street in Stockton would you like us to turn up and spend $50,000 with a bunch of Consultants telling you how to run your business or would you like us to give you a check for $50,000 you can invest in your business yeah it's obvious it's obvious I think h two questions first one what are the ways that uh giving directly can go wrong what are the sort of biggest vectors for weakness in it uh and the second one why is subsaharan Africa still so poor what is it that's happened elsewhere that hasn't happened there so how can it go wrong um it can go wrong obviously on an individual level some people can waste the money and there it's important to understand that this fantastic data showing that in General on a group level it's the most efficient effective way of raising people out of poverty so in that Village there may be one or two people who don't take advantage of it but the vast majority of people will but there will be people who don't things will go wrong there's also can be real challenges around corruption so you have to get your mechanisms right to make sure that the people Distributing the money distribute it fairly and properly and we can use Tech to make sure that we have much better checks around that we're using mobile phones for example so in Africa money is transferred directly to people's phones and getting that right monitoring that the right way and getting the balance I mean you know this is It's All About balance you want to spend as little as possible on overheads but you need some overheads to try to check that stuff is getting to where it's supposed to be um I think another thing that can be a case is is when one Village gets the money and another Village doesn't there can be envy but that's in a sense a compliment to the program the Envy is there because people really feel the other Villages benefited um and I don't think that's something to be ashamed of why is Africa in general done much less well I mean that is the subject of huge books people talk about governance they talk about corruption they talk about the colonial legacies of Africa they talk about the way in which it's been ripped off resources they talk about very bad economic management um and it's a combination of all those things but in many cases cash is very helpful because in many cases let's take even success sucessful places like Rwanda which build a lot of Roads build clinics build schools the cash allows the extreme poor to access those things allows them to build the businesses get on those roads get to those clinics get to those schools so even in the more successful cases the cash is a really good way of of stimulating the economy and getting the extreme poor to touch stuff that's that's been built already how much of a negative impact do you think the S bankman freed effective altruism Fallout has had on uh Forward Thinking charity initiatives give directly cool name uh sex sexy idea uh simple um totally opposite right as opposed to it being top down it's very much bottom up it's we will give them the most um robust resource that they can have and they can choose to spend it however they want as opposed to EA which is we will do all of the analyses and we will come up with I think there's maybe nine Charities that have got their tick at the moment or 10 Charities of all of the charities in the world I think these ones actually do it efficiently um but even though the approaches are very different the actual kind of principle is the same which is it's a Forward Thinking new way to do philanthropy and charity and stuff like that and help help people how much of a setback has eff of altruism uh recent furos has been in um making it more difficult to do experimental charity I I think it these things are always very worrying I mean so yes San bankman free was a big champion of effective altruism and effective altruism is is is is really important and give directly in a sense came out of that movement because it's about being effective it's about analyzing it as you would a business and working out how much difference are you making dollar for dollar and what of course the EA communities found out is that in some cases uh in many cases uh you you're getting less than a dollar benefit from a for a dollar investment I mean that's one of the great things about cash cash is a kind of fundamental Benchmark if you if you can't do better than cash you you you should be giv cash and most people can't do better than cash um I think the sand bankman freed phenomenon though is something that should make us all pause because it's a phenomenon about celebrities it's a phenomenon about egos it's about fashion it's about getting carried away with unconvincing pyramid schemes and I mean there's something about that story which should make us pause because it's so much a story about our culture isn't it I mean it's so much a story about how this guy makes billions apparently out of almost nothing in his 20s and he's like inviting Bill Clinton and Tony Blair out to a Caribbean Island and he's going to save the world and But ultimately it turns out that he doesn't really care about his investors in their money he's taking Reckless risks and he's allowing himself to be presented as this sort of Super Genius super nice guy who's saving the world and actually he's a pretty narrow irresponsible nasty individual and I think that's uh it's it's an important lesson in that and I think it's unfortunately a lesson that that a lot of the big celebrity business people of our of our age are are closer to it than we want to acknowledge you know we're in a society obsessed with making huge amounts of money understandably but the idea that because you've made a lot of money you are the smartest person in the world which I think Elon Musk is tempted towards is very depressing for a culture I mean obviously I have to believe that Nobel prizewinning physicists who dedicate their whole life to working in a lab and don't make a huge amount of money have huge brains and they're not just doing it because they're not smart enough to set up a Bitcoin business Rory Stewart ladies and gentlemen Rory I really appreciate you I'm so happy to see how well your podcast is doing at the moment I I think it's very surprising in a a sea of True Crime and sports podcasts to see uh two people earnestly talking about what's going on in the world being at the top uh where should people go and what what can they expect from you over the the next few months what have you got coming up well we're we're on our way I'm talking to you on my way to the Democratic National Convention um I as I said just come back from Afghanistan we're doing a huge amount on International reporting so there's been this Revolution and ladesh I've uh spent a lot of time in the Middle East where we're trying to get our head around what's happening between Israel and Iran at the moment we're trying to chart this incredible year of Elections I mean almost half the world's population is going to vote this year it's the biggest electoral experience in world history and the world is speeding up it's getting more and more dangerous it's moving faster and faster and so what I hope we're doing is trying to keep people on top of what's Happening all the way from Thailand to Tobago than yeah Rory I appreciate you thank you for today thank you for your time if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch