#837 - Rory Stewart - The Truth Behind The Fall Of The UK
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rory Stewart. He's a British academic, writer, podcaster, and a former politician. From riots to stabbings, useless politicians to corrupt businesses, all wrapped in terrible weather and high taxes, the UK is not having a great time right now. Perhaps Rory can help to explain just what's going wrong.

Expect to learn what Afghanistan is like under the new Taliban control, what the real problems in the UK are, why politicians are so reliably stupid, whether immigration really is breaking Britain, just how bad extreme poverty is around the world, the latest updates with the royal family, and much more.

For those of you who are not in the UK, Rory happens to be the host of three of the top 10 podcasts on Apple Podcasts at the moment. The guy is absolutely prolific and very everywhere and has a unique perspective. He knows what government is like from the inside. He's able to explain and understand why it's so reliably inefficient and why politicians are such unimpressive people. He's really great and there is tons to take away from this one.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rory Stewart. 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 think the first thing is just that it's surreal.

So I was in Afghanistan first when the Taliban were in their last. So 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 they were hanging televisions from trees. I mean, they were on a campaign against any kind of image. So they were literally, you could see televisions 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 $1.5 trillion, that's $1.5 billion 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 and I'm turning up the airport that used to have kind of big pictures of Hamid Karzai, who was the

who was the US-backed president. Now, of course, no such pictures at all. 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 mostly back in shawakamese. Very few women on the streets. The government is basically run by religious leaders, by clerics, by priests. 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 not 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 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 was a horror show. Your relatives were getting killed all the time by either side. It's a civil war. And now it's peaceful. And 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 Coelho. He could have just come back and dug in the yard outside of where he first started.

Yeah, exactly. It's mind-blowing. 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 to the Taliban again. It's just definitional failure. What's going to happen in the...

Yeah, no, no. But I mean, I just think if you're 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, in power, someone that you're able to give a sense of sort of trust and faith in. It's just been mainstream media, government officials, individuals within government, the systems, NIH, CDC, WHO, you know, every single organization and every single individual within them. It's this odd sort of conflagration of

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 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 COVID and I know that we messed up with the blah, blah, blah. It doesn't surprise me. No, no, no. You're right. And, um, but I guess there's part of us that, uh,

We're all so 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. I was a politician for 10 years, and I've just written 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.

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 is the two things we're going to do. We're going to do it.

You'd get a bit fed up, right? You'd 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, what do you say, a less than flattering assessment of the competence level inside of government. You know, there's the Peter principle that 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 it just...

you know, we watch shows like The Thick of It, you know, or Veep, or, you know, whatever, West Wing, and you think, hey, that's a dramatization of it. But then to realize that the real world is maybe more accurately represented by a sitcom than it is by the news. So you 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 people

upwardly mobile sort of aggressive go-getting people? Like, is this something that's systemic? Is it due to the constituent parts? Is it the pool that they're drawing from? What's going on? I think there's two things. I think one of them is the quality, as you say. 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 bright 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 coming

who've kind of opted out, 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 incredibly cynical. Nobody cares about... People basically laugh at you if you try to be serious. I mean, to return to my analogy,

It'd be like being the kind of eager young teacher turning up 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 into that. Is that bottom up? Is that emergent? That's just sort of the...

The cool culture inside of government? Yeah, exactly. It is the cool culture. You're exactly right. So listen, if you sit down, again, my book has a lot about trying to describe this. If you sit down in the tea room 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 Ukraine, 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 basically think that if you try to talk about policy, if you try to talk about ideas to change the country, you've kind of missed the point. You're kind of boring or you're a loser or you've sort of...

Yeah, you've missed what the game is. This is where Dominic Cummings is wrong. It's worse than he thinks. It's not that they get promoted to their level of competence. They're promoted so far above their level of competence. 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 at a catastrophic 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 there's a way of relating to this in the US. If you think about the fight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, very little of it is actually about analyzing what they did in office. So little.

Kamala Harris is doing well at the moment, but nobody is 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's in. I mean, so it's very strange. I mean, it's not like...

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 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. I found, I 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 more scary is that it's this sort of bottom-up emergent milieu, this soup culture

that the 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 cybersecurity

Head of UK Cybersecurity, the job was posted online. Can you guess how much the annual salary offering for the head of cybersecurity 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...

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 in 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 smells a stale coffee, covered in aftershave if they're conservatives. It's just the shoddiness. Then I try to talk a little bit about the States as well. When American politicians read the book, they recognized 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 four and a half hours every day making fundraising calls. So we've got no time to think about policy. 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 that I've ever been away. And the...

The scenes that are coming out and the stories that are coming out of the UK are... I know it's like an embarrassing time to be 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 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 lessons back to 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.

within the last year. People then went out and tried to burn down a mosque. Now, this is literally like the Middle Ages. This is what used to happen. It's what happened to Jews in York in the 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 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 of course, the fact that there's been going on in some ways, versions of this I'm familiar with. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if 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 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.

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 Falkland Islands, a small island in the South Atlantic, and punishment for what they're doing. And 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. So there's all these different bits of...

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 Musk weighing in. I mean, it's been a terrifying situation. And I also think, I mean, 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 wooden. He gave some interviews and he sounded, I mean, he's a serious guy, but I think it's a time when you need to be at the ticker tape. You need to be on the streets. You need to show yourself there and you need to have that

that ability to communicate, 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 learn 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 eight or nine months than I ever did the fish swimming through water, so to speak. And 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 Whitehall or you're like having a chat in Westminster,

The issues of Middlesbrough or Carlisle or Rochdale probably aren't top of anybody's agenda. And I wonder how much the kindling for everybody has been lit because if you're outside of the M25, fuck you. Yeah, it's a big problem. I mean, I was a member of parliament for a northern constituency near Carlisle up on the Scottish border. And

350 miles away from London. And it's a different universe. People are living on much lower incomes. They're living a very, very different life. But it's even more extreme if you get to these areas that you're talking about in 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 had serious problems with unemployment and other things that have gone along with them too. It's a place called Easington Colliery that I was in recently. And that really is a place where there's been serious issues around substance abuse, unemployment, et cetera. And you can see it in the housing. It's not unique to the UK, right? 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. It's the problem. These big, huge mature democracies, when we look at their economies, we forget the fact that there are huge inequalities. In the UK, between London and the southeast, and the northeast of England, in the US, between Flint, Michigan, which is pretty poor,

and where I am talking to you now, which is Massachusetts, which is pretty wealthy. So 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 fancy 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 tees which is teeside 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 sixth form, and then went to Newcastle University. I recognized during the videos of the Middlesbrough riots, I recognized it was actually really activating for me. It took me back to being in school. And there's this very unique category of behavior, which is, I called working class 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 the park hasn't been cleaned in so long. And I think, you know, with the benefit of perspective, you can look at these groups, and you can say, well, 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 distinguished. Do you understand what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I totally do. Um, I totally do. And what you've described is

is something that we should be more honest and open about because what you've described is something that doesn't have easy instant solutions. It's a real problem there. If it were just that the local park needed cleaning up, you'd clean up the local park. But if what you're talking about is really ambient rain, a 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 some of the poor Native American communities, but if you look at the Lakota community in South Dakota, or if you look at Aboriginal communities in Australia, 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

Government's occasionally trying to help. 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 money going in. But as you say, it's a million raindrops. Sometimes you get the sense that particular communities, because societies, are going through something that feels like a trauma. And it's not fixable just by doing up the school, doing up the park.

Afghans, I guess, are not a million miles away from this. I was in Afghanistan visiting a charity which my wife and I set up 20 years ago now. We work with some of the poorest people 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 craftspeople, exported their crafts abroad.

I'm very proud of what we've achieved. I think we have made a real difference to people's lives, their life expectancy. 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 have every reason to be angry about. 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 can be in the back end of 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, what's going on? So 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." The situation in Stockton is a disgrace. The answer is education, education, education. Or the situation in Stockton is a disgrace. The answer is jobs. I'm going to create jobs. Or situation disgrace. It's about infrastructure. We've got to get the road and rail infrastructure going on. Housing. Got to create affordable housing.

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.

I'm feeling this sort of odd symmetry between what's happening inside of Westminster and what's happening in these working class communities because you have

this combination of top-down and bottom-up. You have these incentives and these restrictions, 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 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 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 hostage taker in some way. You know, they've got Stockholm syndrome for a kidnapper that's no longer there. And... Well, I think we all... I think most of us have got...

It 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 poet William Blake where he talks about mind-forged manacles. As humans, we surround ourselves by...

We are incredibly tribal. We're incredibly conventional. We're incredibly conformist. We try 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. If you were to take the 500 people who are trying to burn down a library, which is what we saw last week 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 mean, they might make a joke about it, or they might talk about it. Let me tell you the four things that people would say, right? One person might be like, this is about taking back control of our lives. The second one would be like, fuck 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?

But none of these things are complete descriptions 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 go.

I heard you. It made me think earlier on when you were talking about this, the one policy solution, like the single antidote keystone, linchpin 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 they 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 California where literally everybody, wealthy person I meet is like tech. The whole world will be fixed by tech. I can sort out poverty in Africa through AI. I'm going to, you know, whatever it is. Right. But Ditto, you're right. If you're a football player,

You're like, the answer is sport. Yeah, yeah. So obviously a lot of problems being placed at the feet of immigration at the moment. That's the hot talking point in the UK. From your perspective, what are the big problems that need to be tackled in the UK over the next, over the coming years?

Well, immigration is one of them because immigration is a problem, not just in the UK. It's the problem in France, the problem in Germany, the 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 reason. Voters really care about immigration. And denying that is a very foolish thing for politicians to do.

Having control of your borders is perfectly legitimate. It's not something you should be embarrassed about. Our societies, which are wealthy societies with big welfare states, cannot function with open borders. Cannot. And it's a sort of, we're lying to ourselves if we 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 of the anger is about people crossing on boats from France. And it's completely daft. People in France are not at risk of their lives. Again, we have to be honest about this. France is a safe country. You're not getting on a little rubber dinghy sailing across the channel from France to Britain because you're about to be persecuted or killed. You're fine in France.

Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking after people who genuinely are at risk of prostitution. 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 reasonable target, a number, 0.05% of our population a year. So let's say 30,000, 40,000 people a year that we'd bring to the United Kingdom. In the US, it could be 150,000 people a year.

who are genuinely suffering. We should share the burden. We should have all the countries, wealthy countries, agree how many they're going to take. We could make a real difference to that problem over five, 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. 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? And instead of young Europeans coming in 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. 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. 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, Walsh, the governor of Minnesota, is talking about the fact that he's given $1,500 a year tax credit. So that doesn't, $1,500 a year doesn't make any difference to anyone. That doesn't, I mean, kids are expensive. What's your thoughts? You mentioned Elon Musk and Trump. I haven't had time to watch that interview. I hear that it was a technical car crash, but I don't know about the content yet.

One of the other real hot topics at the moment has been the Digital Hate Act, the 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 one form or another, and free speech is so, you know, endemic to the conversation over there.

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 the ability for people to be scared about what they 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 think the thing to understand is that all this stuff is

is just applying laws that have existed for decades. It's always been a criminal offense to incite people to go and burn down a mosque, long before social media. If you were out there sending letters by carrier pigeon telling people to go and burn down a mosque, inciting a mob to commit a criminal act, helping to plan and organize a criminal act, is criminal.

Now, I totally sympathize. Somebody's just been imprisoned, given a three-year sentence for telling people to go and burn down an asylum hostel and giving them advice on changing their gloves and what kind of materials to use to set the hostel alight. I mean, I think he should be in jail. It doesn't matter whether he's doing it on Twitter or whether he's doing it by sending them letters. I think the more difficult thing is the disinformation stuff. I think they're

Although it's horrifying that a woman was claiming that a Muslim had done this when he hadn't done it, it's much more difficult to prosecute her because she just could have got the wrong end of the stick. We don't really have, for good reason, there's not much precedent or laws around sending people to jail for spreading false stories.

It's going to be a flashpoint, I think. It's going to be a flashpoint. Elon Musk wants it to be a flashpoint. That's the other interesting thing. Up till now, these big companies have cooperated. Twitter under Jack Dorsey, Facebook have always been quite happy to engage with the UK regulator or the EU regulator. If there's something nasty online, people are teaching young kids how to kill themselves

or they're encouraging extreme fasting that leads to anorexia, or there's incredible cyberbullying. 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 Elon Musk 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 fine 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 in a court of law 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 a neutral platform. I'm not an editor. I'm just providing the opportunity for people to put this stuff out there. But that's misleading because the algorithms, right? The algorithms we know deliberately encourage people towards these positions. We could see this for January 6th.

Great work by two New York Times journalists. In the run-up 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 6th.

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, vociferous 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. You end up with a bell curve in the real world and a U-shape on the internet. And I think, you know, I certainly know what you mean. The incentives online will always reward the most inflammatory language, the most simplistic take, because nuance doesn't go far. It's not sexy. It's not memeable. It's not sticky, right? And it's not funny. Right.

And it's often not funny. Make America great again. Coconut, the coconut-pilled coconut squad. It's Brat Summer. All of that. It needs to be simple. Yeah. And I've experienced this myself over the last few days. If I post something saying Elon Musk is a wanker, I can get 17,000, 20,000 likes.

If I put out some earnest message about how we can address extreme poverty in Africa, I can get about 100 likes. Stupid idea. That's boring. Don't talk about that. Exactly. I mean, it is so depressing. If you're like me, 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 if you're lucky, 10,000, 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 a very strange world. Yeah, there's a fantastic insight that I learned from a friend who said, where is it?

A dilemma of tweeting is that you're aware of exceptions 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 tin-eared garbage or getting torn apart by pedants in replies and quote tweets. It's good. It's good. Well, that's what your friend has put their finger on there, too, is that a lot of the attention comes from stirring up antagonism.

I'm pretty sure that I'm getting massive response to my attacking Elon Musk, not because everybody likes me attacking Elon Musk, partly because people are so enraged and there'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, but we're talking within typically our countries. We're talking about Appalachia versus Washington, D.C. We're talking about Stockton-on-Tees versus Chelsea, etc.

How bad is extreme poverty when we take a global perspective? How bad can it get around the world? Well, that's a totally different universe. And we forget about this because we've been telling ourselves the story since the 1980s that extreme poverty was somehow disappearing on its own. And that is definitely not true, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. There were 170 million people living in extreme poverty in Africa in 1980.

There's about 450 million living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa today. So the absolute number, not the proportion of people, but the absolute number has tripled. And when we say extreme poverty, we mean people who are struggling to feed themselves once every two days. The sort of people that I see on the Rwanda-Burundi 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 emaciated in filthy clothes, 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 on that day, is the sort of difference between almost life and death.

There are hundreds of millions of people living in that situation today. And we can make the most incredible difference in their lives. I've been working with this charity, GiveDirectly, and they literally just give direct cash transfers. Very radical, very surprising. I mean, 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 Rwanda-Brundy border, GiveDirectly gave her just under $1,000 and the same amount to every other house in that very poor village.

The changes in three months were unbelievable because you're getting out of the way. You're letting them do it. It's not some charity worker coming in doing it for them. You're literally just giving them the cash. Come back three months later, and you've gone from about a third of people with electricity to nearly 80%. Three quarters end up with a cow. The roofs are all fixed. Everybody ends up with a latrine, with a lavatory.

School enrollment goes up. People are eating twice a day instead of once every two days. And if I think about it, 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 a thousand dollars it's like i'm giving her a hundred thousand dollars and it's costing me a thousand and

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, 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 him to fish and boom, no problem anymore. They're feeding themselves for a 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 can turn up and teach them how to fish, you know?

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? It doesn't work because firstly, in many of these cases, people already know how to fish. They just don't have the money for a fishing hook. 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.

or they just want to be able to invest a tiny bit of equipment that helps them turn milk into yogurt. I mean, they know how to fish, they just don't have 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 healthcare. The woman on the other side is trying to fix up a house. The woman on the other side is trying to do a business selling banana juice. In other words,

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. In that case, they don't want to fish. They want to open a bakery. Then I think the final thing is, of course, somebody in that community will put the money to use so much more efficiently. 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 charity would fix up their house for.

Because they'd bring in their brother and their cousins, they'd use local materials. It's a completely different world. So until I'd heard you talk about this, I'd always assumed that, again, my undue fondness

faith in authority and the people that are supposed to know what they're doing. I'd always assumed that that was the way to do charity. Well, you know, because what about expertise and understanding the best ways to operationalize this? You know, they don't have a Gantt chart. They've not got a nice Gantt 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 know. Don't worry. The people in charge, they'll fly in, air-conditioned plane, they'll land and they'll know how to fix somebody else's community better than they can. It's this sort of oddness.

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 so two things that one of them is the massive vanity so i you know i found this i had a businessman in in london saying to me

Now, I don't want to give cash to these people. 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 Heathrow Airport.

What are you going to do? You're going to turn up in the... But the second thing is just how much money we waste on all those things, on our strategic plans, our Gantt charts, our consultants, our training programs. So I saw this when 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 spend another seven years in school. We allocated $40,000 per school

I turn up in the school and I'm like, "Okay, what's happening here?" There's a row of white land cruisers and there are all these foreign consultants and engineers coming out. They're showing me their strategic plans and their logical frameworks and their consultation mechanisms. Then I say, "Well, can you show me what we've actually produced in the school for $40,000?" 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. There are five red plastic buckets. I'm like, "What is this?" Literally, the cost of that is $1,500 maximum. The bucket's $5. What is this? They're like, "Well, we did all these 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 can wash themselves."

What are you doing? I mean, this is a $40,000 project. Why didn't you just give $2,000 to 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 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 criminals. 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 follow-up.

doing wasteful, wasteful, wasteful, wasteful, wasteful. And at each level of that stage, there is money just leaking out on another dinner that needs to be paid for on another flight to get some fucking consultant out there. Yeah. But they didn't think they didn'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, it's this odd tension between the system that you're working within and your desire to... I'm sure that the people that work for charities and are going out to Rwanda, Zambia, wherever, they're going out there going, I can't wait to waste all of this money. It's just endemic to being... No, no, of course not. Of course not. And it's partly that we're so risk averse. I mean, it's partly that we can't better trust people. A lot of the money is wasted on...

endless follow-ups, financial mechanisms, checks, controls, monitoring. So a huge amount of this money will be wasted on a visit in a year's time to check the buckets that are still there.

Do you know Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy Advertising? Do you know who that is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I do. Yes. So he has this great quote where he says, nobody gets fired for hiring Deloitte. And his point being that people would sooner be wrong in a reliable manner than be right in a risky manner. Because if you mess up whilst hiring Deloitte, 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, Stuart, what the hell were you thinking? If you take this example, the fact is, yes, one head teacher might steal the money. 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. In a normal business, you can take risks, you can fail. But in international development and charities, we don't allow people to fail. We're so terrified of

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 has gone down, poverty as a proportion has gone down, climate-related deaths have decreased by 98% over the last 100 years, etc., etc., etc. And

As population increases, these numbers are going to go up. How do you sort of think about balancing those scales mentally? You know, there is more people suffering, but proportionally less. Yeah, it's very difficult thinking about this. I mean, I think the fundamental answer is that when we were patting ourselves on the back and talking about the massive reduction in poverty, a lot of it was about China. China alone took 700-800 million people out of extreme poverty.

Add India, add Bangladesh, these big populous countries, and in Asia in particular, took a lot of people out of poverty. But in sub-Saharan 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 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 give 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 Heathrow Airport." No bullshit. They know much better than we do. But also, it's about dignity. 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 back to Appalachia or Stockton-on-Tees 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, hmm, two questions. First one.

What are the ways that giving directly can go wrong? What are the sort of biggest vectors for weakness in it? And the second one, why is sub-Saharan Africa still so poor? What is it that's happened elsewhere that hasn't happened there? So how can it go wrong? It can go wrong, obviously, on an individual level. Some people can waste the money. And there it's important to understand that there's 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 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 in 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.

I think another thing that can be a case is when one village gets the money and another village doesn't. That can be envy, but that's in a sense a compliment to the program. The envy is there because people really feel the other village has benefited. I don't think that's something to be ashamed of. Why is Africa in general done much less well? 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, 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 successful 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 stimulating the economy and getting the extreme poor to touch stuff that's been built already. How much of a...

negative impact do you think the sam bankman freed effective altruism fallout has had on 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 ten charities of all of the charities in the world they think these ones actually do it efficiently 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 stuff like that and help people how much of a setback

has effective altruisms, recent furors been in making it more difficult to do experimental charity? I think these things are always very worrying. I mean, so yes, Sam Bankman-Fried was a big champion of effective altruism. And effective altruism is really important. And GiveDirectly, 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 community has found out is that in some cases, in many cases, you're getting less than a dollar's benefit for a dollar investment. That's one of the great things about cash. Cash is the fundamental benchmark. If you can't do better than cash, you should be giving cash, and most people can't do better than cash. I think the Sam 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. 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. He's inviting Bill Clinton and Tony Blair out to a Caribbean island, and he's going to save the world. But ultimately, it turns out that he doesn't really care about his investors and 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. Actually, he's a pretty

narrow, irresponsible, nasty individual. And I think that's an important lesson in that. And I think it's unfortunately a lesson that a lot of the big celebrity business people of our age are closer to it than we want to acknowledge. And 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

is very depressing for a culture. I mean, obviously, I have to believe that Nobel Prize winning 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 think it's very surprising in a sea of true crime and sports podcasts to see two people earnestly talking about what's going on in the world being at the top. Where should people go and what can they expect from you over the next few months? What have you got coming up?

Well, we're on our way. I'm talking to you on my way to the Democratic National Convention. As I say, I've just come back from Afghanistan. We're doing a huge amount on international reporting. There's been this revolution in Bangladesh. I've 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. 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. Heck yeah. Rory, I appreciate you. Thank you for today. Thank you for your time. Yeah.