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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.
So before I get to my guest today,
I want to say a few words about my recent podcast
with Yusef Munair.
In general, I wanted to speak to Yusef more than I did
about the events of October 7th
and the war between Israel and Hamas.
It was clear that Yusef didn't want to dwell
too much on those topics,
but instead wanted to give his take on the history of the conflict,
which is okay, but not exactly what I was looking for.
More importantly, though,
Yusef made a claim in our conversation
that was factually inaccurate,
and I need to correct the record here.
We were talking about Israel's unilateral withdrawal
from Gaza in 2005, and Yusef said,
and I'll quote him at length, he says, quote,
if you look at the explanation for the withdrawal,
and this is something that was documented
in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz back in 2004, 2005,
I'd encourage people listening to this to go back
and read Ariel Sharon's advisor,
Dov Weisglas, who explained the logic behind the withdrawal
at the time.
He did not say we're withdrawing
because we want to move towards peace
with the Palestinians.
Actually, he said the exact opposite of that.
He said, we are withdrawing from Gaza
to stop any movement towards peace.
We want to be able to point to Gaza as a place
that we are going to ensure is a failure
as a reason not to withdraw from the West Bank, end quote.
Okay, so that's what Yusef said.
Unfortunately, that's not remotely what Dov Weisglas
actually said, as my friend,
Noam Dwarman kindly pointed out to me.
The interview is from 2004,
and I'll include a link to it in the show notes.
What Dov Weisglas actually says is that for years,
he and Sharon wanted to make peace
with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution.
But at some point, they realized
they had no negotiating partners on the other side of the table,
and only then, after years of sincere effort,
did they decide to withdraw unilaterally
and end what he calls the political process
by which he means negotiations.
Weisglas doesn't say anything about ensuring
that Gaza is a failure.
He's saying that after years of sincere effort,
they realized that the Palestinians
were not really trying to reach a deal.
And only at that point did they realize
that staying at the negotiating table,
where they would be asked to concede to small odds and ends,
was actually pointless and self-destructive.
So that's my paraphrase.
Here's the direct quote from the interview.
We reached that conclusion after years
of thinking otherwise, after years of attempts at dialogue.
But when Arifat undermined Abu Mazen
at the end of the summer of 2003,
we reached the sad conclusion that there
is no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with,
hence the disengagement plan.
Because when you're playing solitaire,
when there is no one sitting across from you at the table,
you have no choice but to deal the cards yourself, end quote.
So the idea of ensuring Gaza is a failure,
that just appears nowhere in the interview.
And the overall context of the interview
undermines the point that Yusuf was trying to make,
which is that Israel was trying to prevent peace
by withdrawing from Gaza.
Just to be clear, I sent Yusuf the whole interview
and pointed out the factual error
so that I could give him a chance to respond.
But he told me that he didn't have enough time
to go through the original interview
though I gave him many, many days.
So he stands by his initial summary,
which is wrong from what I can tell.
But just so you all know, I'm not blind sighting Yusuf
with this fact check.
Okay, so my guest today is Rory Stewart.
Rory Stewart is a British politician, diplomat,
and author who served as a member of parliament
from 2010 to 2019.
He held several governmental positions notably
as a Secretary of State for International Development in 2019
and was known for his extensive work in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rory has authored several books,
such as The Places in Between,
about his solo walk across Afghanistan
and his new book Politics on the Edge,
a memoir from within.
Rory and I talk about what he learned
by walking across Afghanistan.
We talk about the war in Afghanistan
and what lessons Israel might take from it.
We talk about Brexit.
We talk about why the Scandinavian model
is not appropriate for Britain.
We talk about the culture of the world of politics.
And finally, we talk about why Rory is so passionate
about give directly, which allows people to give cash
directly to the people in the developing world.
So without further ado, Rory Stewart.
Okay, Rory Stewart.
Thanks so much for coming on my show.
Thank you for having me.
So we were just chatting before we started
about how you get guests to open up
and give non-standard answers.
So hopefully you could do me a favor and do that.
I'll try my best.
Yeah, for listeners who weren't in the pre-podcast conversation,
I'm interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger tomorrow
and I'm trying to work out,
because he's obviously been interviewed.
I don't know 10,000 times.
How on earth does one get someone like that
to actually say anything interesting?
I have to imagine that there's an angle into him
vis-a-vis your experience in politics
as an outsider and his experience in politics
as an outsider that if you,
I mean, there's gotta be some meeting of the minds there.
Yeah.
Like that's an angle where you can interview him
in a way that very few people could.
That would be good.
And then I think what you're saying to me
is having the self-confidence to do that.
Yeah.
Because usually when I'm interviewing someone,
I'm so desperate not to talk too much.
I'm just gonna get my question out
and hide in the background.
But maybe you're right.
I mean to lean more into who I am
rather than just be any old interviewer.
Yeah, absolutely.
Especially someone with as unique a story as you,
speaking of which, you know,
you are a major part of your stories
that you spent over a year walking through
India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan.
This is not a typical thing.
Your average person is done.
That's quite a remarkable thing in fact.
And I'm curious, what do you learn by walking through
place that you don't learn by, say, driving
or by just, you know, going town to town
from a, with a normal mode of transportation?
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
So just a bit of background on that.
So I was 28 years old and I took two years off work
and I walked for just over a year and a half.
I stayed in 550 different village houses
between Turkey and Bangladesh.
I walked 20, 25 miles a day and I crossed Afghanistan
just after 9, 11.
So just after the Taliban had fallen
before the new government had taken over.
And I was obviously a young man
and I think what I thought I was going to take from it
was the sense of this line of footprints stretching behind me
that I'd be able for the rest of my life to sort of remember.
So I walked 6,000 miles.
And I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe I'd be able to remember 10 million foot steps.
But of course, I can't.
I can't remember most of the landscape now.
But what I did take away from it is the insight
into the village houses I stayed in
and just how different people's lives were.
And I'd been a British soldier and a British diplomat
and I was about to go to work in Iraq
and then back in Afghanistan.
And this walk totally transformed the way
I saw those societies suddenly for the first time.
I really understood that the way that we were talking
about these people, born no relationship
to the reality of their lives.
And so just to finish on that.
I walked across Afghanistan, the winter of 2001-2002.
I was in villages where usually most of the women
had never been more than two hours walk
from their village in their life.
So the place had come from that morning
had no relationship to their existence
where maybe in a community one out of 100 people
could read or write where villages were in vendetta's war
with their neighbors.
They couldn't walk from one village to another
without getting killed.
Where village chiefs were complete dominant powers
where opium poppy was being grown.
And I turn up in Kabul and I see my former colleagues
diplomats, United Nations people.
And they say every Afghan is committed
to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralized state
based on democracy, human rights, real law.
And I thought, I can't even translate this into Dari.
I don't know how you'd say that to someone
in one of these villages.
And that very simple insight about the gap
between the kind of way we talk
and what the reality was like on the ground
to find at least the next 10, if not 20 years of my life.
So is this where you got your policy
towards Afghanistan, your recommendation,
which you argued for for many, many years of a light touch,
as you call it, a light touch
sustained over a long period of time
as opposed to the Obama strategy,
which was a heavy touch with a deadline.
Yeah.
How does that connect back to your on the ground experience?
Thank you.
So firstly, you're right, my instincts in Afghanistan
were that we had done a good thing,
helping Afghans to get rid of the Taliban,
but the point is it was helping Afghans
to get rid of the Taliban.
That initial so-called invasion in 2001,
basically a few hundred American soldiers,
that was an Afghan movement.
And my sense was that we needed to let
an Afghan government with Afghan elections
and an Afghan army run the country
with a little bit of support behind.
But that if we made the mistake of trying to micromanage
get into every province, rebuild,
and my goodness, we began to do this.
We ended up the U.S. and its allies,
and it reached the search under Obama,
but it was happening in the lead up to that.
Ended up with 150,000 soldiers on the ground,
150,000 civilian contractors,
$1.7 billion of expenditure,
which is just beyond imagining.
And by doing it, we made Afghans feel
they were living under a foreign military occupation.
Villages were seeing these people turning up
like Robocop out of these humvees
and those incredible kind of armored suits with guns.
And of course, a lot of people have been killed.
And I think that was a recruiting for the Taliban.
The Taliban had vanished very quickly.
2002, 3, 4, 5, it was not coming back.
We made it come back.
We gave them the legitimacy.
We gave them the thing to fight against.
Then in 2014, the search stops,
and we went down to very small troop numbers.
And that's what Biden inherited.
Biden inherited about 2,500 American troops left
in Afghanistan.
Tiny number, 25,000 American troops in South Korea,
for example, to put it in context.
Not a single American soldier
being killed for 18 months.
Not a single British soldier being killed for six years.
They were in these bases.
And the Taliban was nowhere.
But what had been lit through the search
was the drive to withdrawal.
And exactly what I was worried about happened,
which we were going to lurch to a massive troop increase.
And then we were going to ban the country entirely
and hand it back to the Taliban, which is where we ended up.
So how did the surge lead inexorably to the withdrawal?
Because I think it's unsustainable.
I think if you start putting in that kind of money,
those kinds of numbers of troops,
once that number of people have been killed,
people are like, whoa.
If you had held a few troops with very few casualties,
the Afghan government and the lead,
you could have remained there almost forever,
which is what, of course, the US has done in South Korea.
Been in South Korea since the 1950s, the late 1940s.
Nobody worries about US troops in South Korea,
or Japan.
So knowing everything you know now about how the pullout
was mishandled, how we abandoned our allies,
the horrific scenes at the airport with mothers,
literally trying to hand their babies,
would you say it would have been better
if we hadn't gone in at all?
Or do you still think our intervention
as problematic as it was, was a net good?
I don't think in the end it was a net good, I'm afraid.
I don't think you can justify.
We literally went into a country controlled
by a Taliban government, spent $1,700 billion, $1.7 trillion,
and left and handed the country back to the Taliban again.
I don't think there is any way you can defend that.
I think it's completely indefensible.
And Iraq is an even deeper mess.
I mean, Iraq is sort of beyond the matching.
I was in Iraq again last February.
It's so strange.
I mean, I don't know how many Americans go back to Iraq now.
You drive from the airport.
And the first thing you see is a huge sign
attacking the American government
with a monument made out of a vehicle
which was hit by an American drone strike.
On the airport road, it's kind of the biggest monument
as you come in.
You drive all the way up to most of us
sign off to sign attacking the United States.
That's the result of what was achieved
after goodness knows how many thousands
American soldiers were killed,
tens of thousands of Iraqis killed,
again, trillions of dollars invested.
So it's madness.
So many people right now,
we're speaking right now in late October,
a few weeks after the attack on Israel by Hamas.
And many people are drawing parallels
between the kind of warfare we did in Iraq
and the kind of warfare.
The IDF is likely going to have to do in Gaza
if they do begin the ground invasion.
Do you think that there are lessons to be drawn
from Iraq and Afghanistan that are applicable
to Israel right now?
And the last piece of this is many people have said
that this is Israel's 9-11.
Some people even point out that it actually
is equivalent to several 9-11s for Israel
given their population and the psychological effect
of how many people in a given community
know someone personally affected by a tragedy.
So do you think there are lessons to be drawn
from Iraq and Afghanistan for Israelis right now?
Oh, I think deep, deep lessons.
I think we're in such a polarized divided time
on this issue about Israel and Hamas.
At the moment we're speaking, I think it's important
before I say anything else to say,
Hamas mounted a horrifying terrorist attack
that it is unimaginable what was done to those families
and what's happening now to those hostages.
At the same time, a ground invasion of Gaza
would be the most terrible mistake.
Every time a civilian's killed
and there will be lots of civilian's killed,
you can't fight your way through an urban area like that
without a huge amount of collateral spending casualties
is a social media gift to Hamas
and will be seen all over the world in an instant
and will deepen the hatred, deepen the violence
between Palestinians and Israelis in a way
that we can't begin to imagine until it starts
which is why I'm very, very pleased
that so far Israel has held off
because yes, there are so many lessons
where I can have got so many.
The U.S. and its allies fought through fallujah
horrifying up more for in 2004
but perhaps more relevant was most sought
which as I said, I saw last February.
Still, in ruins, hospitals jamed into the ground
because they were hosting bomb factories.
It's the most depressing place.
I mean, the fighting there was 2014, 15, 16,
took almost two, three years to clear ISIS out
and it literally looks like an astounding grad
of photographs of these cities and the Second World War
that have been bombed to pieces
and it's never gonna recover.
I mean, tens of billions of dollars would have to be spent
in the beginning to get it back on its video.
So I just can't see how that's gonna work.
I can't see it as anything other
than a deeply destructive radicalizing force
and it's tragic and it's very difficult
when you're asked this kind of question
not to say I wouldn't be starting from here.
Now, how on earth did we get ourselves into the situation
where these are the only options available now?
I can understand that Israel is a sink to this
will say, what are we supposed to do?
We can't have Hamas living on our border
being able to mount this kind of attack again.
They're gonna say if we don't do a ground invasion
or don't take really drastic action,
we're basically having a situation of no deterrent signal
for them to just do this again
and that's it will radicalize
but how radical they are already.
Exactly, which is exactly what people will say
to which I would say no, you've done enough.
Israel has dropped in the first four days
dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza.
The entire Libyan intervention was 7,000 bombs
to put that in context.
Nobody watching what's happened to Gaza
over the last week in the Arab world is thinking
there's no deterrence.
Israel doesn't respond when things happen.
I don't think Israel now showing some restraint
is going to sort of embolden the hand of Hamas.
The Hamas government has been broken.
Gaza has been smashed to pieces.
Tens of billions of dollars worth of damage
have been done.
People's lives are measurably worse.
There will be many, many Palestinians looking at Hamas saying,
what the f have you done to it?
I didn't think you need to mount a ground invasion
not to make that point.
Yeah.
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Let's pivot a little bit.
Let's pivot to Britain.
Not only did you walk all across South Asia
and in the Middle East,
you also walked from Scotland to Penrith, right?
So this is also interesting.
What have the same question?
What did you learn on that walk that you wouldn't necessarily
just learn by driving around?
Well, so to explain that,
that's the next stage of my life.
So I was briefly a soldier and infantry officer.
Then I was a diplomat, served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I then went off,
I then set up a non-profit set up a charity working
cable for three years,
rebuilding the old city of Kabul.
Then I went to Harvard as a professor.
And then in 2010,
I came back to run for the British Parliament
and Penrith where I walked to from Scotland
is this wonderful district,
this constituency on the English Scottish Board
of the largest, most sparsely populated constituency in England,
including the Lake District and the Hadrian's Wall.
It's, keep struggling for what the American equivalent would be,
but I don't know, Wyoming or Vermont or something.
I can highly rural, very beautiful remote place
with very few people living in it.
And so I walked through it.
And I walked through it because I felt that the way
to learn about the area,
to try to represent people was to stay with them,
be in their houses, walk alongside them,
visit their farms,
visit every one of the villages in Hamlet,
so my constituency, I walked through everyone.
Because it's how I learn,
it's how I get a feeling for a place,
how I remember a place.
And there genuinely I was able to remember a bit.
It was good to be able to say,
if somebody could say to me,
how about I don't know,
scared I'd say, oh yeah,
there was that guy Tom,
who I stayed with at the corner
and then there was that toy shop
and then there's that farm at the end with them.
Yeah, it's helpful for me.
And where did you grow up?
So I was born in Hong Kong.
Okay.
So my father was a British diplomat
and a soldier as well.
And then in Malaysia,
and it was very strange when I was running
to be mayor of London,
people would say to me,
but you're not in a real Londoner.
And I'd say, listen,
I wasn't born in the United Kingdom,
50% of people in London were not born in the United Kingdom.
I'm proud to represent them.
Yeah, so I have to imagine
the district you walked through
was quite different than London.
Very different London.
But I'm a Scott.
So I come from a sheep farming area
in London Scott.
So it's less different to that.
Got it.
Which is what I was connecting by these two.
And I'm somebody who has a deep,
deep love of rural areas
of small family farms.
I'm very romantic.
I love history.
And I had the whole of Hadrian's wall
this great ancient Roman frontier running through my,
half of it running through my constituency.
And these amazing castles and forts.
And so it's funny being British
because we live,
this is something I've just written a book
called How Not to Be a Politician.
It's just just published.
And part of the book is about writing about how,
as a politician, you find your,
what is it you're representing?
What is the country you're standing for?
Because of course you're standing for individuals
and all the individual people who vote for you.
And those that don't vote for you,
that's really important.
You're representing the people who don't vote for you
as well as the people who vote for you.
So kind of fundamental truth.
And you're trying to understand them.
But you're also representing
an even stranger thing called a country.
What is a country?
You know, a beyond its flag.
And for me, landscape is a very important part of that.
History is a very important part of that.
Tradition is a very important part of that.
I was talking to British acquaintance about a month ago.
And he said that one of the questions he ponders most
is that what story does Britain represent?
What story can a young Brit be proud of today?
And the way he framed it was that several generations ago,
the story of Brit would be proud of
would be the sun never sets on the empire.
And this is just taking for granted
as the story to be proud of.
That story is not one that most are proud of anymore
for many good reasons.
And he was trying to tell a kind of post-World War II
version of the British story that is something
a force for good in the world of a different kind.
What is the kind of story that you feel
a young British person today might tell?
Well, firstly, I mean, I think what your friend said
is very important.
Our national identity for 200 years
was arranged around the sense of, as you say,
I don't know, whatever it was supposed to be,
a quarter of the world being painted pink,
being part of the British Emperor.
And then when that faded, our national story became very much
about standing up for Hitler during the Second World War,
Winston Churchill, and we produced all these war movies.
And we were incredibly proud that we,
with the United States and the Soviet Union,
so it gets Hitler when the rest of Europe fell
and this was a really important part
of defining identity, but you're right.
For very good reasons, we turn away from empire
because it was a race's exploitative project.
We also, for good reasons, don't really
want to be defined by war anymore.
You know, it was a good war.
It's good to fight Hitler, but equally a society,
75 years after a war, can't define itself by the fact
we did well in the Second World War
because the people who fought in the Second World War
were so dead now.
And then we didn't live in that kind of society.
We're not a militarized society.
The ideal British man, probably,
for a lot of our history was the soldier.
And we're now in a society where
almost nobody joins the military.
It's not a much less than in the United States, actually.
Veterans in the US still have a very big status
because you are a kind of empire.
You're a kind of superpower.
And therefore, I noticed there are big movements
to get more veterans into Congress
and all this kind of stuff going on.
Yeah.
And then you stand in a line in the US
and you veterans are kind of asked to go first
when you're boarding an airplane.
It's always board first, yeah.
Yeah, this comes to us.
None of that stuff in Britain.
We're not that kind of society at all anymore.
And so what are we?
I think we are a society that wants to be
many different and contradictory things.
I think it's important to understand
our geographical diversity.
So, and then I'll talk about what unifies it.
Geographical diversity.
If you're a Scott, you're proud of being
in your minds less pompous in the English,
less boring than the English.
She said you're funny in the English.
If you are living in a rural area of England,
in a traditional community,
you probably pride yourself on being polite,
understated, having a stiff upper lip
and bits of strange tradition.
Whether it's your love of strange dish water
called English tea or whether it's walking in the mountains.
If you're somebody living in London,
it is about embracing one of the great multicultural cities
on earth, let's say, 50% of people here
were not born in the United Kingdom.
It's about the fact that we are very, very proud
that with all the problems that we have in some ways
that we are making more of a success
of a very, very multicultural society
than anyone, almost anyone else on earth.
You know, we have a cabinet now
that is one of the most ethically diverse cabinets.
Any governing group in the world,
our prime ministerous of Asian extraction,
our hemsecretary, our foreign secretary, et cetera.
And Mayor of London is a Pakistani.
I mean, this is an amazing change
over the last 20, 30 years, unimaginable.
I also think that Brits would pride themselves
on ironies, that's a humor, self-deprecation.
We are very proud of our video game industry,
we're very proud of our music industry,
we're very proud of our soccer, our football.
But what holds it together, that's the different thing.
So there's a different thing, right?
I mean, somebody who's proud of video games and soccer
isn't necessarily having a direct conversation
with a woman who's interested in her cup of tea
and the Yorkshire Valley.
And multi-ethnic, multi-diet,
ethnic diverse parts of Britain
are not necessarily having good conversation with white,
but it's a bridge.
Any more than I guess, I don't know.
Mr. Cipi is having an easy conversation with New York.
So what holds the whole thing together?
Well, in our case, it's not a flag,
it's not a constitution,
because we don't really have a constitution
and our flag is this sort of very strange thing
doesn't make much sense.
It's very, very odd, tenuous ideas
of certain kinds of values,
which I think British people believe very strongly,
but they find difficult to articulate.
And they're very, I think British modesty is misleading.
I think they're incredibly self-confident people
at some level, a bit like Americans
and probably a bit like French
and a bit like the Indians,
but like Chinese,
they think they're the best country on Earth,
but they don't really want to say this 21.
And they don't really understand why everybody else
doesn't realize that they're the best country on Earth.
There's different with Americans,
we don't really mind saying it.
Right.
We believe it and we say it right away, saying it, yeah.
Okay, so let's rewind a little bit.
You are someone that decided to get into politics
later in life, relative to most colleagues, yeah.
I had Andrew Yang on this podcast a while ago,
and in a way similar to you,
he's a man that really lived a life prior
to probably even strongly considering
let alone going for it.
And he kind of, he wrote a memoir about it as well
and described the experience of campaigning
as just sort of constant humiliation
and really the way he told it,
it was not something you would ever want to do lightheartedly.
It's a decision you really have to,
you really have to mean it
and you really have to want it
and have thought through all of the costs.
So I'm curious, what is it that made you take the plan?
Navity, I don't know what I was getting into.
I mean, how not to be a politician?
It's a story about my going in
with a lot of the navities that I think
many of us have about politics.
If you've not been a professional politician,
most of these people that you're talking to
have entered politics in their 20s, volunteering,
being staffers, being on the hill,
doing all this kind of stuff,
volunteering for their local parties,
having mentors for politicians, loving the game.
You know, I was just reading
the autobiography of Donald Rumsfeld.
It's a extraordinary story.
I hadn't quite realized.
His working career was the third of the entire length
of the United States.
Guy entered Congress in his mid 20s.
He was the youngest defense secretary
in the United States under Ford
and the oldest defense secretary
under George W. Bush
and he was just a politician through and through
and you got a sense,
this was something that he'd taken up in his early 20s
and he just knew all the games.
Lyndon Johnson would be another example for,
don't quite say it.
And of course, Preston Biden,
you guys have veteran politician of all politicians.
You can sort of see him as that kind of guy
in his early 20s,
clean cut beautifully presented,
already a kind of senator in the making.
And I wasn't like that at all.
My idea of politics is the kind of idea
that we all have at school
where we have kind of black and white photographs
of I know Gandhi or Nelson Mandela on the wall
and it's this kind of noble thing
and we're gonna change it.
Well, it's got no relationship at all
to campaigning to the party whip,
to legislation to anything like this.
And I got into it and of course, I discovered
what it really feels like to be a legislator
in a parliament to raise money.
You know, I have friends in the US Congress
who say they spend 110,000 hours in two years
just making fundraising calls.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
Mitt Romney said to me,
he came to see me at Harvard just before I stood
for the British parliament and said,
Rory, get all your thinking done now
because when you're a politician,
you're never gonna be able to think.
And I think it is.
So this book,
how not to be a politician is a book
which is not just about Britain.
Of course, the story is about Britain
but I hope it's a bigger story
about democratic politics.
And one of the central themes
is how destructive it is,
to your mind, your body and your soul.
I write about John Kerry a bit in the book,
Al Gore.
And how?
Kerry does not come off very well.
No, it was a strange encounter.
Or in order to stay with Cameron.
In order to stay with Cameron.
No.
And I think it's because something about
the strains of the job
makes them into permanent public figures.
They lose their private side.
They're on message all the time.
They felt that John Kerry,
he was like meeting a Roman senator on his way
to becoming a marble statue.
You know, I've got a lot of admiration for him.
But boy, if you sit at a dinner table with Al Gore
at one end of John Kerry at the other,
that's not a happy dinner party conversation.
I can assure you, right?
You know, one of them's talking
about carbon parts per million.
The other ones trying to remember
the names of obscure Afghan tribes.
They're just projecting down the table.
Neither one of them is listening
to a word anyone else says.
Absolutely.
I've had that experience with some politicians.
I won't name them.
Yeah.
It's a very strange, but it does something to you.
Yeah.
And then the question for the public is,
why would you like someone like that
running your country?
Because actually the problem with that
is that that style of campaigning
and promoting yourself is very bad
when you sit around a cabinet table
and have to make decisions.
Because you've trained yourself
to be 100% confident all the time.
100% simplifying.
Having the solution to every problem.
You're the person chosen.
And suddenly you're confronted with COVID.
And you have to learn how to say,
whoa, I've never seen this before.
I've never heard of this before.
I've got no idea what the do masks work.
Don't they work?
You know, is the Chinese lockdown working or isn't it?
Should we be vaccinating?
Should we be closing schools?
What impact it's going to have in the economy?
You know, what are my values here?
And these are things that really require
unbelievable humility and introspection and time
and days of sitting and really thinking through fuck.
What risks am I prepared to take?
Where are we going to be in two years?
I'm boy, we don't get those politicians.
Is it that we don't get those politicians
because in some way we get what we deserve?
Are the superficiality and all the problems
you've highlighted with most career politicians?
Is it the fact that we actually want this?
We hate it.
We might hate the results of it,
but we actually, when we pull the lever,
this is what we appear to want.
Or is it something else?
Is it that we're only being given a set of options
that are subpar because of how the options
get filtered before we even get the chance?
I think it's a bit of both.
I think, on your first point, getting what we want,
I think there's a side of us all
that quite likes larger than life,
hyper-confident bullshitness.
And that's why people vote for Boris Johnson
and Britain or Donald Trump.
Or actually a lot of politicians
who may not be quite such egregious populists,
but who have some of the same kind of match as swagger
because there's part of us
that just wants to throw a hand grenade at the whole system.
And it likes the sense of it.
Boris Johnson, who is my kind of arch-nemesis,
I ran to be Prime Minister against Boris Johnson.
He beat me, but so maybe what I'm saying
is tinged a little bit with bitterness,
but one of the most revealing things he said is,
I'm successful because I'm the only politician
who realizes that the public thinks that we're all schmucks.
And I'm open about being a schmuck and people love that.
And that's also Donald Trump to a tee.
Right, right, right, right.
And I can totally see why that works.
Whereas somebody like me who is boring
on about complicated technical policy issues,
sort of agonizing about moral choices,
a lot of the public look at interesting
and disguised as hypocrites, bullshit.
It's just a different type of bullshit.
I feel safer with somebody who at least
is open about being a lying for landering, whatever.
I don't want some sort of tortured would-be saint.
But you're also right with your second point,
which is that, boy, do we not get a good choice
because our party systems and the way in which the media works
does not help produce nuanced thoughtful people?
I mean, I am a huge admirer of Obama.
I thought President Obama was an extraordinary intellect,
an extraordinary orator.
Nobody else could have pulled off the Iran nuclear deal.
And this is a very good example of where his intellect came to play,
where he really made a difference,
particularly in things like foreign policy.
And he was a freak in the sense that it was total chance
that this very young senator managed to sort of make it
through the system because Henry Clinton kind of blew herself up.
And nobody was batting lives at rank outsider.
Somehow he made it.
But he's the exception, not the rule.
We don't have a system that's providing us
with that kind of option most of the time.
I think you mentioned that in your case,
you really narrowly were able to even run in the first place
because of the expense scandal, which maybe you can explain briefly.
Most of my audience will be American and won't know about that.
And all of these doors fortuitously opened
that then closed kind of right after you got through.
It's incredibly lucky.
So the fact is I'd not been a member of a political party.
I'd spent most of my life working outside the United Kingdom.
I was the professor at Harvard.
That would normally have totally disqualified me
from running to be a member of parliament
because it's a process controlled by the party.
And they want to check that you've got the right party views.
You are proper conservative.
You know, how have you voted?
Have you delivered enough leaflets?
Have you proved your loyalty to them?
And I was very lucky because in 2009,
there was a terrible scandal where it was revealed
that a lot of members of parliament
had been cheating on their expenses
or not quite cheating, but bending them pretty crazily.
They were using public money to clear out the votes
in their house or by little houses for their ducks.
And this was all exposed and all these guys had to resign.
Mostly guys, there was some women too,
but mostly guys resigned.
And suddenly they were scrambling around trying to find members
of parliament for all these constituencies.
And most of the ambitious politicians
had already signed themselves up for other places
so that were these vacancies everywhere.
And David Cameron, who was then the leader
of the conservative party,
said he wanted to change politics
and bring in people from the outside.
He'd never been in politics before.
So I took him at his word and I set up
and there was an open primary
in which everybody from every party
or no party, anyone in the place could vote.
And I was lucky enough to be able to do that.
But as you say, after I selected,
they closed all their doors.
They shut the open primaries.
They stopped this kind of selection.
Nowadays, you would only really be able to get in
if you had been basically a party member
since you were at college.
Right.
And you were viewed by other party members
as not firebreeding enough,
a little bit mushy middle, as they say.
Yeah.
Not conservative enough, right?
So you're the kind of guy
that only can have success in an open primary, right?
Correct.
Yeah, I couldn't get an open primary
because I couldn't appeal to the center.
Right.
Yeah.
And obviously, I think that's one of the biggest problems
with the electoral system, certainly in America.
Is that the vast majority of places
don't have open primaries.
So, and then there's these other ideas,
like rank choice voting, approval voting,
and I don't know if you have views on any of this stuff.
But do you see, what other changes do you see that are?
Well, I mean, I don't know how many of these things
are implementable in any of our countries
because politicians don't want to be
turkeysvoting for Christmas.
They don't want to change a system that's benefited them.
Sorry, I've never heard that expression before.
That's beautiful.
I guess you'd say turkeysvoting for Thanksgiving.
I guess you tend to get more Thanksgiving more.
OK, I got it.
We eat a lot of turkey at Christmas.
Yeah.
But they, yeah, if I have my way in these countries,
I would put in an element of proportional representation.
I'd go for something more like the New Zealand system
where you keep some connection between the representative
and the district, but you balance it out
so that the vote for parties across the country
is represented in parliament.
And you break the two party system.
You end up with four or five parties
and you can bring some fresh blood
and you can bring a bit more diversity in.
And you give a bit more freedom and movement
to people to be able to enter without being choked
by these primary systems.
So you say at one point in the book
that the Scandinavian model doesn't work for Britain.
And this was part of a larger explanation
about why you are conservative rather than labor.
So can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, so it's a difficult one
because a British conservative is a very strange thing.
I would probably, and I would certainly be a Democrat in the United States.
I would not be a Republican in the US Republican Party.
But for me, a lot of this is about being suspicious
of strong central government and believing
in the wisdom of people and decentralizing
and letting people get on with things.
And I feel that's true, not just of politics,
it's true of economic decision making.
I, and I felt it's so strongly in Iraq
and I've kind of sent a figure back to where I began with,
which is people saying everybody in this country
is committed to a gender-sensitive multi-ethnic centralized state
based on democracy human rights rule.
I'm just like, this is crazy.
What you need to do is recognize the texture
of these different communities and these villages
and their wants and their needs and their priorities
which are totally different each and the other.
So I believe in the wisdom of communities.
I believe in really nurturing that.
I think I'm probably more comfortable
with the idea of being a mayor than a national representative.
And why is that?
Because I think as a mayor,
you are much more directly accountable
for things that make a real difference in people's daily lives.
And they can literally stop you in the shop
and poke you in the chest and say,
what's wrong with the traffic lights out there?
Why is the police doing this and you can fix it?
Whereas if you're a senator,
you're so far away from the ground,
you're not really in a position to fix this kind of things.
So I had Garrett Jones on my podcast a while ago.
He's an economist from George Mason University.
He has a controversial book called 10% less democracy
where he argues that while democracy is great up to a point
for preventing horrible wars, famines, et cetera,
that beyond a certain point, actually,
the people don't know what's best
and it's better to keep power in the hands of elites.
And he gives simple examples like,
success, pretty unfashionable argument.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
But he actually gives at least one compelling example.
And the obvious one is an independent federal reserve.
Right.
Like the fact that the president cannot fire,
the people cannot fire the head of the federal reserve
who sets rates very important.
Yeah.
Who are we keeping it independent from?
In some sense, the people.
Yeah.
Judges and our courts are like that.
They're not politically appointed.
There's none of this stuff that you have in the US
of the president stacking the Supreme Court.
They're much more like your federal reserve.
They're totally independent.
Do you think that that model works better?
I believe generally the other direction.
I'm a kind of more radical democracy guy,
but I do think that you need to be challenged
by a fully independent judiciary.
I think it's a problem in the States.
This is Supreme Court is politicized.
Our judges are totally not politicized.
I think that's better that situation.
I agree with him about an independent central bank.
I agree that in certain things
that she's such as foreign policy.
I disagree with Jake Sullivan,
the national security adviser
who keeps talking about a foreign policy
for the middle class.
And what do people in Detroit think about exactly
what we're doing in our West Balkans policy
or our policy towards Sudan?
It's a mad question.
They're not thinking about that most of the time.
They don't have time to.
Of course not, yeah.
But on the other hand, I believe in more democracy.
I'm a great belief in citizens assemblies
where you randomly select 300 people,
totally demographically representative,
but random like a jury.
And you let them sit down for six, seven days
in a room with experts
and really get their teeth into an issue.
Could be abortion.
Could be in Britain something like Brexit,
even the European Union
could be climate policies in your community.
And it produces the most magnificent results.
It's kind of transformative.
It sounds crazy.
Because these are totally randomly selected people.
And yet they consistently produce better results
than elected politicians.
Interesting.
So speaking of Brexit,
what is your viewpoint on Brexit?
Or from the vantage point of 2023?
Yeah, so to remind American listeners,
we left the European Union.
We voted to leave the European Union 2016.
It was a huge fight about how we would do it.
It was a 52, 48% vote by the public.
And once that voted happened in retrospect,
there was nothing to be done about it.
You can't have the majority of your public
be asked a question vote to do something and not do it.
But I tried to go for the softest version of Brexit.
So say, okay, fine.
We'll leave the political institutions to you
because remember, Americans I think don't fully understand
how the European Union worked.
And the European Union, from the British point of view,
was supposed to be more like NAFTA.
You had a relationship you have with Canada or Mexico.
It's kind of a free trade area.
But it had become something with its own parliament,
its own civil service, its own commission.
So I tried to argue, okay, let's find you'll leave
in the European Union.
I'd been on the remains side.
I want to stay on the European Union.
But if we're going to leave,
let's leave the political institutions.
But let's keep this open trading relationship
because it's vital for our economy.
It's vital for Northern Ireland and the Republic.
So the good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland
was based on the fact that there were no borders.
So that if you were an Irish Republican living in Northern Ireland
because of no borders, you could feel you were living in Ireland.
And if you were a British unionist living in Northern Ireland,
you could feel you were living in Britain
because you can move freely between the two.
It was a fantastic solution to a problem
that it killed thousands of people.
But of course I was defeated.
And Boris Johnson went in and went for a very heartbreak
except that ended up putting borders in the Irish Sea,
massively disrupting our economy.
And their dream, which was that by leaving the European Union,
they were going to be able to kind of radically deregulate
and create a kind of Singapore on Thames
and make these amazing trade deals with the US and China
and of course prove to be deluded.
And so we're now in a very difficult situation.
But a situation where none of the political parties
have prepared to talk about a closer relationship
with the European Union.
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Okay, let's pivot a little bit.
I know the problem of global poverty,
extreme poverty is very important to you.
And specifically the idea of direct cash transfers
to people.
So I guess talk a little bit about that.
I guess I'll say something first,
which is my understanding not having looked at the data closely,
but every few months I'll read an article
and be economist or something about global poverty
is that in my lifetime it's continued to come down remarkably,
but very much as a China effect in particular
and an India effect to some extent,
like the rise of China from 1970 or 80 to today
accounts for a good deal of what looks like
the global progress and alleviating it.
So is that your understanding
and how do cash transfers play a role?
Well, so firstly, you're absolutely right.
We have a shocking problem with extreme poverty in the world.
And yes, there are some statistics that look positive,
but they're largely about the fact that China lifted 700 million
people out of extreme poverty.
If you look at Sub-Saharan Africa,
there were 170 million living in extreme poverty in 1980
and there are 470 million people living in extreme poverty
in Sub-Saharan Africa today.
And that's partly to do with population growth,
but even as a proportion of the populations
in many of these countries,
the numbers are going in the wrong direction.
And when I talk about extreme poverty here,
we're talking about people living on less than a couple
of dollars a day.
These are people who will be eating,
will be able to eat once every day or once every two days,
who almost certainly will not have a roof on the house,
who will not have access to electricity,
who will not be able to afford a cow,
for milk or a calf or a goat.
They will not have the slightest bit of money
to even start a tiny small business.
They might be able to get a little tailoring shop
off the ground above.
And so they've got no hope.
They do not have enough money to meet their most basic needs
and their children will be malnourished.
Many of their children will not be in school
because schools, although they're meant to be free
and not really free, you have to pay a bit of money.
You can't really go to school if you've got no money at all.
They will be able to access healthcare.
So that's the problem.
And then we come to the solution.
And the amazing discovery,
which people still don't understand over the next 15 years,
is that you can transform people's lives by giving them cash.
It sounds completely crazy.
Because the whole development model for 70 years
has been about people like me going around the world,
turning up in villages and turning them up to do.
There was this great cliche,
which is teaching man to fish, he eats for a lifetime,
give them a fish eats for a day.
And giving them cash seems like the most amazing
fish giving program.
So instead of which we've been going around teaching everybody
to fish, which basically involves pompous people like me,
or it doesn't need to be somebody from the global North.
It could even be somebody from the capital city in the country.
Turning up in a pretty expensive car with a nice salary,
turning up in a village and educating them,
teaching them how to set up a business,
teaching them what their kids should be eating,
how to improve nutrition for your children.
And nobody counted how much that cost.
Nobody said, wait a second, we take all the money
that we're spending on all these nonprofits doing that.
And we just gave it to them and cash.
What would happen?
And then radically 15 years ago,
some economists from Harvard and MIT,
young graduate students, set off with $40,000 to Kenya,
set up this little organization called Give Directly
and just started giving out cash.
And then they studied the impact.
And they began doing randomised control trials,
which are like a medical trial,
where you randomly select one group of people
who are getting the normal programs for the NGOs.
And you count how much money they're getting.
This is the benchmark studies.
And then you take the same amount of money,
you just give it out as cash.
And then you study them over 369, 12 years.
Or the full randomised control trial,
you find random stacks of people
who aren't getting cash and a random selection of people
to whom you give cash.
But randomly selected, so you know it can be measured.
And study over 369, 12 years.
And the cash just outperforms.
It's miraculous.
And we know it works.
So when somebody comes to you,
say, well, isn't that counterintuitive?
Are they not going to steal the money?
They're not going to drink the money.
They're not going to take drugs.
We can point to these trials and say, look at the data.
Does it matter if you give the money to say,
women as opposed to men, for example?
So women and men do slightly different things for the money,
but actually surprisingly,
men and not as irresponsible as you would have thought.
That was the implication behind my question.
Yeah, I know.
Often the idea is you give to women.
They spend the money better.
Women often spend the money more on children
and domestic environment,
men and a little bit more on setting up small businesses.
But over time, people, women and men in poor communities
know how to put their money to work.
And I think just a couple of small things out of that.
I mean, I think one is that before the randomized
control trials came along,
what all of us who worked in development did?
I mean, I ran a charity in Afghanistan.
We would say, okay, I ran a little program
in this village and 10 years later,
here's this lovely girl who's now going to college.
That's because of my program.
Nobody ran around a randomized control trial
to really ask, is it really because of your program?
Or could it be to do with a hundred other factors
in the girls life, which when you actually randomize it,
you can tell whether your programs
make a difference on them.
And the second thing I think is the discovery
that people in very poor villages know
what their priorities are, completely differently.
And their priorities will be very different,
one house to the next.
You might want to, I don't know, get your kids in school.
I might want to get an aunt in hospital.
You might want to fix your roof.
I might want to buy a cow.
You might want to start a small business
all the way around the village.
And the cash flows down like water into a rough mountain
landscape filling all those gaps
in a way that no other program could
because that old cliche, you know,
give them out of fish sheets for a day,
teach them to fish sheets for a lifetime.
What we realized is that many of the villages
already know how to fish.
They just don't have the money for a fishing hook.
Or they don't want to fish.
They want to open a tailoring shop or bakery.
In a way, there is something very fahiac
about this insight that it's really about
the distribution of knowledge.
It's about the fact that outsiders don't have
the detailed local specific knowledge necessary
to know which problems need to be fixed.
And so it's less efficient than simply
just giving everyone cash and letting each individual
who knows their own circumstance better
than any outsider could apply that, right?
Exactly.
And that's why I'm so proud of gift directly.
And they've also been very smart with technology.
I mean, to declare an interest,
I was present to gift directly
on our senior advisor gift directly
and there are other organizations that do this.
But what they're doing, which I think is so powerful,
is they're using mobile money.
So in Africa now, everybody's banking on their fence.
You can deliver the money directly to someone's phone.
There are no middle people.
So an old grandmother can get the money on her phone.
Nobody knows how much she's got.
It's hidden on the account of her.
And give her actually then invests in the monitoring
and the evaluation and the follow-up
and a little bit of conversations
about what she's going to do with the money
before she receives it.
But it's unconditional.
But most what you're doing is you're saying,
look, would you like to come and visit the neighboring village
that got some money six months ago
and see what they did with it?
Absolutely up to you, but you might be interested at all.
If you're thinking of going into agriculture,
there is this government extension worker
who can talk about fertilizers and pesticides,
but it's your, it's your call, it's your money.
So something wonderfully humble about it
because it's not somebody in the global laws
getting the vanity and the ego boost of thinking,
I fix someone's problems.
I've invented a special seesaw
which when you pump it up and down, produces water
or I've worked out that chickens have eggs
and eggs have chickens, so I've given chickens to people.
It's saying, wait, what do I know about
whether these people want chickens?
Chickens made the last thing they want
for whole series of reasons I can't begin to contemplate.
I'm sure you've heard about the infamous example
of the water pumps in Africa that were powered by...
Well, that's right, this is a...
What do I think are the roundabouts?
Yeah, yeah.
And they work so terribly
and they're like, all the Westerners felt so good
about what they had done,
only to have these poor African grandmothers
pushing these things out, just slaving away
at this totally inefficient water system.
And nobody asking how many millions of we spent on this?
Yeah.
Whereas what we're finding is we're giving money
to households and they are...
I mean, just to give you the results,
you look at a village on the Rwanda Burundi border,
you find that within about three months
of the cash arriving, they have gone from 40% of people
without electricity to 80% from a third of people
with livestock to nearly 80% with livestock.
You've got every roof in the village has been fixed.
Everybody who didn't have a toilet has got a toilet.
Bone densities improved, stuntings improved,
nutrition in general has improved,
education in role-mances has improved,
small businesses are flourishing
and you're doing it for very little money,
you're only giving $700,000 per household.
If you commissioned a government or a non-profit
and said those are all the indicators we want you to deliver,
they would spend untold millions
surveying those buildings, bringing in engineers,
trying to fix all the problems themselves,
setting up complicated business training,
you can imagine.
So it's not just that...
Well, I suppose there's two things,
it's much more efficient way of achieving development,
but it's also giving dignity to people.
It's really trusting them to fix their own lives.
So two small objections or thoughts people may have
to this model is one inflation and two disincentives from work.
So inflation is a good thing to be worried about.
When you put cash into an economy,
you've always got to worry about inflation.
The truth of the matter is though,
because these are relatively small amounts of money
and because very sadly,
the extreme poor are a very small part of these economies
because they have very little money.
We are not seeing big inflation impacts.
There was a careful study,
partly with Oxford University in Kenya,
called General Equilibrium Studies,
specifically focused on inflation.
And it didn't find inflation really at all.
I mean, very small amounts of inflation.
What it did find was something we weren't expecting,
which was an incredible spillover effect
that for every dollar we were putting into a village,
it was $2.50 benefit going to the surrounding villages
because the village getting the money
was employing carpenters, buying cows,
fixing rooms from people and all buying goods
or selling goods to surrounding villages.
So the economic stimulus was very impressive.
Distance-centivizing work, again,
I think it's important to understand
that this is different from poverty
in the United Kingdom or the United States.
These are people who are literally
on the edge of starvation,
who have spent 20 years sleeping on a dirt floor
with a grass roof that is leaking
with their kids starving in front of them.
And in the United Kingdom,
poverty, yes, it's about cash,
but it's not only about cash, it's about,
you know, I was the President's minister
and in our presence at the moment,
50% of people have various forms of mental health issues.
40% have been removed from their families
to put in care when they were kids.
35% have been excluded from school.
They're a huge addiction issues
and fixing somebody is not fixing
but helping somebody's life,
supporting them when they leave prison
is about housing, it's about employment,
it's about addiction treatment,
it's about mental health supporters,
about many, many other things.
Whereas if you're looking at a village
on the right of Bernie Porter,
there will be 3.7 million people, everybody
in all those communities is living in extreme poverty.
And their fundamental problem
is that they simply do not have a month money
to put food on the table.
Okay, that's a, we covered a lot of ground there.
The book is how not to be a politician
and the website organizationisgivedirectly.org.
So unless there's anything else you want to plug
for my audience.
This was a great way.
Would I plug for your audience
and say that you're a great engineer
and I'm going to take this inspiration
when I get to see Arnold Schwarzenegger tomorrow.
Thanks very much, good luck, by the way.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thanks for recording, thanks for having.
Okay.
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