867: Rory Stewart | Walking Across Afghanistan and Iran

24:04Well, first of all, that is incredible, but you can't just drop lost city and be like, well, it wasn't that. You discovered, you came across a lost city. Tell me about that. Well, I came across a city that had been uncovered by villagers in about the three weeks before I arrived. And it was a city from the 12th century that had been destroyed by Genghis Khan called the city of the Turquoise Mountain. And it had been lost to history. No one had any idea where it had been. And I arrived and I found villagers in this very deserted valley in the very center of Afghanistan, digging into the hillside and pulling out carved wooden doors, ivory chess pieces, fragments of Chinese porcelain, and the capital of an empire that once stretched from Delhi and India to Baghdad and Iraq, including some extraordinary things like Hebrew tombstones from a Jewish community and things like that.

24:52What? How many people lived in that city back, of course, when it existed? It would have been a huge city back then. I mean, I guess, you know, 30 ,000, 40 ,000 people. Wow. But now totally deserted in the middle of nowhere. And all that remained of it was this amazing minaret, 165 feet high with turquoise blue tiles around the neck, which had been first spotted by a foreigner in 1956. But the archaeologists had dug around the base, found nothing else, and concluded that maybe this was just a tower on its own. They'd had no idea really there was a city around it. That is incredible. I mean, the idea that they're finding all these artifacts there that nobody had been there since, or really had been there since that had been sacked in, and my history is terrible.

25:34When would Khan? Genghis Khan, early 1200s. So this thing has been left alone for 800 plus whatever years. That is just unbelievable. So now I assume there's a zillion archaeologists still working on this. Archaeologists turned up, but unfortunately too late. The villagers basically looted it. That's another problem in Afghanistan. I almost felt at the time, I need to sort of sit here and kind of control the site and stop people from doing this, which of course I wasn't able to do. I mean, it was a ridiculous idea anyway, because they weren't going to particularly listen to some strange foreigner trying to rush up and down and say, stop doing that.

26:07Stop doing that. Don't do that. That is painful to hear, because as I'm sure you know, but just for listeners, I've done episodes on basically antiquities theft. And the problem is it's not the item that you dig up that's in the villager's house that says, OK, sure, I'll sell this to you for 25 bucks. It's an ivory chess piece. It's the digging around it with the, you know, you see the guys in the TV with the cartoons with the little paintbrush and the little tiny tools. It's all the layers. And when you rip something out of the ground, those layers are gone, they're destroyed. So you just never know the context in which this thing was buried.

26:37You don't know if it had been on a guy's body, which was covered in leather, and then that was, because that's all just gone, and it's lost forever. It's just really, oh, it's such a shame. It's a great, great pity. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Rory Stewart. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins. You've probably heard of Vital Proteins. They're the number one brand of collagen peptides in the U.S., and for good reason. A lot of people, myself included, take it pretty much daily to support things like healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, joints, all the good stuff.

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28:35This episode is sponsored in part by the GIST podcast. If you're looking for a news podcast that is smart, unfiltered, and doesn't just echo whatever side you already agree with, check out the GIST with my friend Mike Peska. Mike's been doing this longer than just about anyone. It's actually the longest-running daily news podcast. It's earned that spot on Apple's top charts for a reason. And each episode is around 30 minutes, so it's perfect for your commute or while you're making breakfast. It's always packed with sharp, thought-provoking takes. What I love about the gist is that it's not stuck in a partisan box.

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30:08Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Rory Stewart. work. I love some of the travel tips that you have, one of which was open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. That's a travel tip I hope I never have to use, but I assume you probably had a few of those. I mean, did somebody say, hey, by the way, don't walk across that field. It's been mined. Oh, how do you know? There's no sheep on it. Exactly. You get it from other people. So another tip that I believe in strongly is people often say, you know, how much money are you carrying?

30:48The truth of the matter is that if people don't see how much money you're carrying, it doesn't matter how much money you're carrying. The amount of money you're carrying, if it's concealed, doesn't increase the chance of you being robbed. It just increases the amount you lose when you are robbed. That's my second insight. My third insight is basically you don't need to carry any of the stuff you think you need to carry. I mean, it took me a long time to accept this, but you don't need a head torch. You don't need to be able to see at night. That's a luxury. You basically don't need a book. I carried chlorine tablets, so you don't really need to carry too much water.

31:22And you don't need a tent. You can just put a bivy bag outside your sleeping bag. And you don't need a cooking stove. You can just eat cold food. And all those things I think are important because if you're walking 25, 30 miles a day, every extra pound, you're going to curse by the last hour of that day. I can only imagine. I mean, that's a, for somebody who walks five, sometimes 10 miles a day, sometimes with a pack, sometimes without, doing twice that or more in snow for a year, it just sounds nightmarish. You must have been completely jacked by the end of that, despite the protein situation.

32:00I was fit, but I was a pretty scrawny, underfed individual. Yeah, I think it would have been like a 97-pound soaking wet kind of ripped as opposed to meat on the bones kind of ripped. Yeah, exactly. Surely everyone you met there thought you were some kind of spy, right? You're walking around with maps and you speak the language fluently. That's just too sus. But weirdly, nobody thought I was a spy. Nobody really was very curious about me. One of the interesting things about villages is that they didn't ask many questions. I think it's the fundamental truth about humanity. People prefer to talk about themselves rather than ask questions about other people.

32:35But I guess, I mean, to sort of segue a little bit, I think the biggest lesson I took from the walk is about global poverty. I was staying with some of the very, very poorest people in the world. And I was seeing a lot of really bad aid programs, really kind of crappy development programs. And a lot of these villages I went to, I was seeing big signs saying gift to the Norwegian people or gift to the Swedish people. And these were abandoned schools, abandoned wells, crumbling toilet blocks, and such a deep level of cynicism from the local villages about what on earth these foreigners thought they were doing, spending all this money and delivering basically no benefit to these villages.

33:15So what I do now, I'm now the president of an organization called GiveDirectly, which is trying to very radically change the way that we do international development. And our big insight, I guess, is to try to get rid of all of that and just give people cash and let the villagers have the cash and sort out their own business rather than us telling them what to do. I do want to talk a little bit about aid and how it's wasted. I did a show about dictators, episodes 794 and 795. And one of his main points was bad regimes, authoritarian dictator type leaders, they love aid and they never actually want to solve the problem the aid is for because the last thing you want to do is say, hey, I don't need those millions of dollars you're pumping into my economy every year or every month.

34:01find another place to go help. You want to make the tiniest incremental step, if at all, just so that the tap stays on for as long as possible. So it sounds like this is, you're taking the opposite approach. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's so much that's wrong with it. There's the problem of the dictator, but then there's the problem of us, broadly speaking, generous people from what we would call the global North, Americans, Europeans, Brits. The problem with us is that there's a lot of vanity involved in doing aid. And there's a lot of slightly condescending views of the extreme poor.

34:36So let me just give you two examples of that. We basically believe that you should be giving people cash. And the two problems with that are firstly from people who say, that just sounds dumb. You know, I want to contribute my brain. I want to contribute my intelligence. I want to invent a children's seesaw, which when they sit on it also pumps water. Or I've got this amazing insight, which is chickens have eggs. And maybe if I give people chickens, their eggs will have more chickens. And they don't want to say to their friends when they're showing off, I just give cash. They want to say, I'm doing some really clever thing.

35:09I've invented some app that's fixing poverty. The second problem is that we were all told when we were children, give someone a fish they eat for a day, teach them to fish they eat for a lifetime. And giving cash sounds like a massive fish giving program. But the truth of the matter is that many villages, when you say, I'm going to teach you how to fish, they already know how to fish. They probably know how to fish better than you do. And maybe they don't even want to fish. Maybe they want to open a tailoring shop. So the whole model of aid, this idea of capacity building other people, training other people, implies that you know much more about them than you really know and that you can be teaching them stuff that's relevant to their lives.

35:51And there have been two revolutions in international development. One is in Africa now, people basically keep money on their phones. Their phones are their bank accounts, which allows us now to deliver money directly to people's phones without going through governments or middle people. And the second thing is there's been an explosion in what we call randomized control tests. They're like medical studies where you have a control group and a treatment group. You give cash to one, you don't give cash to the other. You study over as much as 12 years and the results are unbelievable. Turns out if you give people cash, it's better than almost any other program for nutrition, for education, enrollment, for health, for shelter, and just study up, say 350 studies.

36:32The problem is convincing people of this is so difficult because we have a huge psychological block on cash. Of course, the gut reaction for this is just as somebody who's looked into this and dealt with GiveDirectly. And by the way, before I forget, I'm gonna mention this a few times on the show, we're doing a GiveDirectly fundraiser. We're gonna attempt to lift an entire village in Kenya out of extreme poverty by delivering cash donations with no strings attached, a la GiveDirectly. A kind-hearted donor's gonna be doubling our donations, so if we gather 20 ,000, it'll transform into a$40 ,000 total donation, bringing hope to families that struggle to afford even the most basic necessities of life.

37:08GiveDirectly is the first NGO helping the inhabitants of Namani. This is a very, very remote rural Kenyan village. Our goal is to gift$1 ,000 each to all 36 families, so that's almost 200 people residing in the village of Namani. It is in the Kalifi region of Kenya. This place has no water regularly. The pipes go dry for a week at a time. Medical care is too far away. Most people can't get there. Seven families out of the entire 36-family village have a place to sleep that is permanent. The rest of the folks are kind of building temporary stuff or just not anywhere. education is$3 a semester and over half of the residents can't send their kids to school because they don't have$3 per semester.

37:49Despite these hardships, we are really hopeful that these families are going to utilize the cash donations and address their most urgent needs and lay the foundation for a brighter future. They're going to be buying land for farming, covering school fees to educate their kids, buying livestock like goats that can endure the droughts. They're going to improve their homes, metal roofs, protection against the elements, cement floors so they're not sleeping in the dirt, that kind of stuff. They're going to be starting businesses. I just think this is going to be amazing. I want to follow this journey.

38:14I will give you guys updates as well, but we need your support. Of course I'm donating, but I would love to have your support as well. Go to give directly.com slash Jordan to donate. Donations are tax deductible in the U S if you're overseas and you're like, Oh, I can't support your mattress sponsors and whatnot. Definitely go to give directly.com slash Jordan and support the show that way. And if you email me a screenshot credit or donation, I will send you a personalized video thanking you. GiveDirectly.com slash Jordan. Very exciting project. I was worried initially. I said, don't people just kind of take it and spend it on crap?

38:48I mean, not necessarily beer and cigarettes and booze or whatever. I would be worried about that too. But just somebody who's never had a bunch of money, why would you give them 850 bucks? Aren't they just going to go, great, now I'm going to put, I'm going to buy this thing that has temporary value? I mean, how do we know they're going to spend this well? That's the objection I think most people are sitting with. Such a good question. Well, the reason we know that they're spending it well is through these randomized control tests where we study very, very carefully how people spend the money and look at the results.

39:19And the results are amazing. Explaining those results, I think, is about understanding that if you are in real extreme poverty and the people who are literally on the edge of starvation. These are people who will be eating maybe one meal a day, sometimes one meal every two days. They'll be living in a grass hut with a leaking roof. They will not be able to have their kids in school. They will have horrible life expectancy. And they will have spent 20, 30 years of their lives thinking about what they would do if they just had a little bit of money. And when they get that money and we come and we explain the money's coming a couple of months before it arrives.

39:56So it gives people time to think. We encourage them to visit a neighboring village that's already had the money so they can see how other people have spent the money, get ideas, talk about it. And often we give it in three installments. So you'd get the first hundred dollars, spend that, think about how you did that. Then you get another installment in a few weeks time. The result is that people spend it very, very practically. What we tend to find is people will buy a cow so that they can have some milk and some calves, get their kids back into school. If they don't have a toilet, they'll dig a little toilet block for some sanitation.

40:30They'll fix their grass roof. And if they've got a bit left over, they'll invest in a small business, tailoring shop, bicycle to move their milk or yogurt to the market. Or they'll set up a little savings group with other people in the community, which allows them to take out money less regularly, but a larger sum of money. So it's very practical. And I guess that's just because if you were in that desperate need, that money is literally the difference between life and death. you're not going to spend it on something dumb. That does make sense. I've looked at, of course, the GiveDirectly website, which we'll link in the show notes.

41:01And there's groups of women who had sort of pooled their money, I guess, and decided to get running water in the village, which was incredible. Talk about a selfless act where they could have spent that money on anything, even their own home, and they decided that they were all going to get running water for the village. I hope they were able to, I hate that I'm saying this, monetize that so they could get their donation back in some way and actually do something that's only for themselves when they did this selfless act. Yeah, you're right. People do do a lot of that. It's very striking. I mean, you'll see that villagers will often run the last mile to connect to electricity.

41:35They'll dig the last bit of the road to connect to the main road network. So often people pull their money together. But the great thing is, of course, they do it much more cost efficiently. If you were to go to an international charity and say, we need to supply water to this village, Engineers would arrive, plans would be written, strategies would be written, big land cruisers would turn up, and you'd end up spending a fortune doing that. Whereas the villagers make every dollar go so far because they're digging the pipes themselves, they're laying it themselves. They are really trying to save their money.

42:09I remember one of the aid examples in the dictator episode, he made a pretty compelling argument for aid being a net negative in many ways, and there's something called tide aid. So the example was in Bangladesh, they have ferries. So boats that take people across, I guess, some river or lake. And Denmark was like, hey, we're going to repair these ferry boats because they're in terrible condition and they sink and they kill people. They ended up spending over 400 percent more because what they did is instead of having these ferries repaired at a shipyard in Bangladesh, they shipped them to Denmark so that they were essentially subsidizing the ship industry in Denmark and repairing these ferries and then shipping the bag.

42:48It was ridiculous. It's heartbreaking. And I'm afraid we all do it. The United States still, if there's a famine in the Horn of Africa, will export maize, which is grown in Idaho. Huge costs. So you pay farmers in Idaho to grow it. You put it on a plane or a ship. You take it halfway around the world. You drop it on a community whose priority is often something quite different. Like they need shelter, they need a tent, or they need some medical care. They end up selling the maize for cash at a huge discount and then trying to buy what they need with the cash. And you've wasted this incredible amount of money.

43:23So they end up getting 5 % of what the US taxpayer has actually spent on trying to help them. It's really gross. And some of this is done because you're subsidizing the local industry. So it's easier to say you were going to give$100 million in aid to a country than it is to say, well, we're going to give a tractor industry$100 million. And then people go, well, what the hell? What about our industry? No, no, no. We're giving food to poor people in Africa. Oh, well, all right, fine. There's no way for me to grift off that. That's exactly right. And of course, you're thinking about your political lobbies.

43:54You're thinking about the fact that the farmer in Idaho wants to be subsidized to grow maize. So the fact that it may be better for the Somali to get cash and might be better for Somali farmers because they could grow some of their own food gets pushed out of the picture because really you're driven by the politics. Right. So then if anybody was growing maize, wherever you just dropped off 30 or 300 tons of it, they're going out of business because now people can't wait to get rid of it. So your entire livelihood is now screwed. So GiveDirectly does the opposite, right? You're essentially saying, hey, what small business does your community need?

44:26We really need somebody who cuts hair because nobody really does it. And I love doing it, but I can't afford lights and a pair of shears in a chair. And so they spend the money on that. And then suddenly there's a local business that's buying from other local businesses. 100 % and the thing that's special about it is it's not give directly going to the village and saying hey what business do you want to do and then spending expensive money on consultants and buying you the shears for you and setting up the thing by giving you the cash it allows you to adjust in micro ways every house is different every business is different every need is different if I think about your podcast if I turned up and said to you and remember in in Africa we're talking about a dollar is like$100 for people in extreme poverty, because it's a much, much poorer country.

45:14So it'd be like coming to you in the podcast and saying, you've got two choices. You know, either I could give you$50 ,000 to invest in your business, or I could spend the $50 ,000 on a bunch of consultants coming in to tell you how to run your business. I'll take the cash. You take the cash, right? Yeah. And I think this is the point from the villagers. They are just infuriated. So often I talk to them and they say, this lovely person came from Denmark and they taught us what fertilizers to use and what seeds to plant. And I'll say, oh, so are you doing it? And they're like, no, they spent all the money on teaching us.

45:46They didn't give us any money to buy any seed or fertilizer. Right. So they have to just remember that for the next round of people that maybe leave some of the seeds and fertilizer behind. It's so performative and some of it's unintentionally so. It's just, it is really, really sad. I was looking at GiveDirectly and where they operate, 650 plus million dollars directly into the hands of over 1.4 million people living in poverty. So world's fastest growing nonprofit in Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Turkey, Uganda, Yemen, and the United States. I have to say, pretty interesting.

46:21You know, you hear people escaping Congo, Rwanda, Yemen, and then it's like, oh, and Chicago. I suppose I could look out my window here in California and see why, but that does stand out. What are you doing in the United States? We've done, I think, three main things in the United States. One is to respond to hurricanes and natural disasters. So again, with a natural disaster in the United States, often what people really need is the cash to buy what they need. What they don't need is you turning up and saying, hey, I just gathered all my secondhand clothes at home and I've turned up and you can have my son's lacrosse t-shirt when actually what they want to do is get some food.

46:58I shouldn't laugh, but it's so, it's what we all do. Oh, I'm donating a couch. It's got bugs in it and there's a hole in the middle, but you can have this. Thank you. Exactly, whereas often actually the markets work better than you think. And what they'd rather do is go to Walmart and spend some cash getting what they actually need when their house has been wiped out by a hurricane or a flood. The second thing we did is we did COVID response. So during COVID, obviously people were stuck at home and people in extreme poverty in the United States needed a bit of cash support to get through. And now we've been working in Cook County and that's around Chicago and in Georgia with the city and state governments to support people in extreme poverty.

47:38We're looking particularly at different segments. So we've supported particularly African-American women. We're bringing together a project in Flint, Michigan, which you would have heard of because it had that great scandal around its water supply. I'm from Michigan. I'm very familiar with Flint. It's really that whole thing is a shame. and there's like two cops in the whole place and they're on their own and the water is undrinkable and it's just, it's been forsaken for the last 30 plus years. Really a shame. 100%. We do do stuff in the US and we're proud of what we do in the US. But the core of our work is still the extreme poor in Africa because the truth is that what we're trying to do in the US is build models and encourage the US government to do more of this stuff.

48:22Because in the end, the US government has more resources than we do. So we're piloting, we're developing models, we're showing what can be done, and we're hoping to change the sector in the US. But in Malawi, what we're doing is directly changing individual lives. And what's amazing is that in Malawi, you really can transform someone's life with a gift of$550 or even less, whereas in the US, that wouldn't have the same impact. Operating in the US, some people are saying, okay, fine, Jordan. Rory, tell me why I should help people outside the country when so many people inside my own country need help.

48:57You mentioned that$550 doesn't go as far, but what else? I mean, why should I help somebody in Malawi and not fund Flint, for example? I think it's really important to understand what extreme poverty means in Africa. When we talk about extreme poverty in the US or the UK, we're talking about people on maybe $30 a day. When we're talking about extreme poverty in somewhere like Malawi, you're talking about people who are going to be lucky to be making$2 a day. I came across a grandmother looking after three grandchildren who got$3 cash a month. And she is at night getting a cooking pot with stones in it and putting that on the fire in the hope that the noise of the stones in the cooking pot are going to send the grandchildren to sleep when they're hungry.

49:46That's horrific. It's the most shameful thing that as our world gets wealthier and wealthier, we still have people living in conditions as poor as have ever existed in world societies that there are. There are unfortunately hundreds of millions of people who are still in the most, most terrible situation. I mean, it's awful to see it. It's not dignified. They're not able to live anything like the kind of fulfilling life you'd want a human to live. Earlier when I'd asked if people waste or misuse cash, GiveDirectly has done quite a bit of research towards showing that, because I was, of course, highly suspicious.

50:23I mean, it was one of my first sort of objections was I just can't believe it, that people don't waste it. Of course, change, any given change isn't necessarily guaranteed for a given program or a given individual, but a lot of the outcomes were really impressive. Lower HIV rates, lower child mortality, lower suicide rates, higher child growth, self-reported indicators of health, lower domestic or intimate partner violence, school attendance is up, stress is down, depression's down, deforestation is down. I mean, there's all these sort of, I guess you would say, knock-on effects, if that's used for good things as well as bad things, that tend to show up that were surprising.

51:03Why is deforestation down, for example? That one kind of, I had to scratch my head there. Deforestation's down because there's less pressure. When people are very, very poor and they can't afford any basic cooking equipment, they will go into even national parks, even protected forests, and they will cut down those trees, give them a little bit of income, raise them out of poverty a bit, and they are able to support themselves in other ways. And you will see it also with things like poaching. So it's about understanding, I guess, what you're pointing to, Jordan, is underneath all these things is the question of poverty.

51:38And it turns out that all the other things we're talking about, health, education, your business, your shelter, these are just, in many, many cases, the number one thing that correlates with doing badly across the whole board is being poor. And having a little bit of money, just getting off that desperate, destitute, struggling to survive into a slightly more resilient space, giving you a chance to lift your head up. I was talking to a Kenyan man who's now working with us, who I thought was very interesting. He'd been working in the States. He was a student in the States and he had been trying to pay his way through college doing three or four jobs at a time.

52:17And he said that one of the things he remembered, which was true about poverty in the US and poverty in Kenya is the sense that when you're really struggling, when you're in debt, when you can't meet any of your bills, when you're trying to hold down three, four jobs, you just have no space to think. You have no space to kind of lift your head and make any decisions about your future. You're just trying to get through the day. And I think that's what hopefully this support can help people do. At the very, very least, those few hundred dollars allows somebody to live a slightly better life. And in many cases, it has an almost permanent impact on their life.

52:53We can see people who've received grants 12 years earlier still doing better than their control group because it's just given them enough of a leg up, get a little bit of livestock or invest a little bit in their business so that when something hits, God forbid COVID hits again, they just have that much more resilience to make it through. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Rory Stewart. We'll be right back. Definitely support the fundraiser for this episode. All the sponsors are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals, but the fundraiser is at givedirectly.com slash Jordan. More info on that later, and of course, in the show close as well.

53:30Now for the rest of my conversation with Rory Stewart. I loved the economics of this, how the cash stimulates the local economy. So a dollar spent is a dollar earned by somebody else, of course. And in Kenya, it looks like there was a multiplier of 2.5x. So for every thousand dollars given to a household, the local economy grew by$2 ,500 with no, and I know people are going, but inflation with no serious inflation effects. This is like a dream come true for a free market economy fan, right? So instead of dragging the wheat from Idaho to Africa, you give somebody who buys the machinery to grow and harvest their own.

54:11He buys the gear, not an NGO buying it from a vendor at 150 % markup because the logistics and red tape, hiring people to grow it and harvest it, selling it locally. I mean, it's really incredible. And it's how come, I hate asking these kinds of questions, but here we go. How come no one thought of this before or have they? And it's just phased resistance. I think the answer is that psychologically, we liked the idea of saving other people. We liked the idea that we were in control. We liked the idea that we had knowledge that they didn't have. We like the idea that people were poor because they didn't have knowledge.

54:47And it was very uncomfortable for us to accept the possibility that somebody might be poor just because they didn't have any cash and that if they had a little bit of cash, they would be in a better situation. I mean, it's not completely revolutionary because, of course, in a way, welfare programs in Europe or the United States do often acknowledge that if a mother has got children and can't support them, they need a bit of cash to get through the month. But I think what's different about this is understanding not giving a small amount of money every month, which has a real problem on how you sustain it, and a real problem about how somebody gets out of that situation.

55:24Seeing the power, particularly with very poor communities in Africa, of giving a lump sum, which can really give someone a chance, at least, to graduate out of poverty, a chance to get into a different economic level where they're not going to have to be that dependent on these things in the future. Right, okay. Okay, so monthly small payment, not as good as lump sum that gets them to jump out of the pit, so to speak. Well, that's what we're trying to demonstrate. I mean, what we're hoping to do is really begin to demonstrate this at scale. And why we're very excited at the idea of you working with a particular village and listeners getting involved is that we actually think that this could be taken to a district level, ultimately even to a national scale, and that we might be able to, in our lifetime, end extreme poverty, that cash could be a really big driver.

56:11It's not the only thing. I mean, I want to emphasize there are many other things that count. It helps if you've got a decent government. It helps if you've got some good roads and good schools and all that kind of good stuff. But to include the extreme poor in that story, to let the extreme poor benefit from that road, from that school, you've got to give them a little bit of cash to get going. And what we're hoping to demonstrate, if by some extraordinary reason, some incredible billionaire was listening to this program, and wanted to write a check for$100 million, they could take an entire district and demonstrate at an enormous scale what could be done.

56:47And then we could sell the story to the UN, to the US government, to others and say, stop the old model. We have now demonstrated at scale and we've documented it. We've done the right research, the right evidence. We've done the right randomized control tests. Here's the model, take it on. You hear that, Zuckerberg? Time to put your money where your mouth is. Yeah, forget the VR thing. Come on, it's never going to happen. On the other hand, I was also thinking maybe he and Elon Musk, when they do that boxing match in Vegas, maybe they could give the proceeds. I was wondering if you were going to bring that up.

57:17Yeah. Yes, the proceeds go to give. We would love to have the proceeds go to give directly. First of all, I would absolutely pay to see that because no matter who wins, we all win because they're both going to get punched in the face at least once, hopefully. You've never lived more vicariously than when you've seen Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both get punched in the face. That would be brilliant. And I just, I love the results, right? I was looking, I scrolled through, you have testimonials on the website of what people are doing with the money, which is very smart because it's less of that veneer of like, okay, the money goes here and then people do stuff with it.

57:50It's like you hear directly from the people who started a sewing shop, started a farm, bought a moto taxi, started a repair shop for whatever cars or whatever it is, bicycles, food stands. And a recent study that I found on the website showed that refugees increased business ownership and increased earnings by over 60 % after receiving cash aid, which is incredible because usually when you look at things like refugee situations, you just go, gosh, this is hopeless. They're all going to go on welfare immediately and drain on the state. And we just pity them and nothing more. And when you compare job training programs to simply giving cash, giving cash actually works better at improving entrepreneurship, which really, when you think about it, is not a surprise, right?

58:36Because if you're an entrepreneur, you don't need job training as much as you need the ability to kick off your business. And I know that firsthand just from my own life. I have a law degree. I didn't necessarily use it to start my business. I needed money, which I got from my law firm before they fired me. But they call it layoffs, but we all know it really happened. I do have a question, though. What if you don't get cash and your neighbor does, right? I'd be kind of pissed if somebody came in, gave all my neighbors a thousand bucks or the equivalent of what, a hundred thousand bucks. And they were like, sorry, Jordan, maybe you'll make the next round if we ever come back.

59:13How do you control for that? You're absolutely right. People, and this is true for any program, doesn't matter whether you're giving someone weeds or you're supporting people to go to school, people who don't get the support will be angry. Generally speaking, our answer to that is to do a whole village at a time. So we find villages that are in extreme poverty, where we're confident that almost everybody in every house needs assistance. And then we will give assistance to every house. So you don't have that problem, neighbor to neighbor, but you still have the problem, potentially of the next door village.

59:43But in a way, that's inevitable. If you're doing good, and it's a sort of backhanded compliment. I was discussing this with a colleague who said, but if you give one village a capacity building seminar, the other village isn't jealous that they didn't get it. But if you give one village cash, the other village is jealous. And I say, well, that's a kind of backhanded compliment to cash. The reason they're angry is that they can see that the cash makes the difference. That's a reason to do more cash, not less. Actually, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. I hadn't thought about that. I do have some figures that I'm going to go over in the show close about how the money gets there, what it does.

1:00:19I won't spend your time going over that, though. But for people that are interested in thinking about it, stick around for the show close and I will go over it. It is psychological, right? It's not that people are selfish, I suppose. And this is even aid workers. It's just that if you have, I would imagine as an aid worker, it's tough to confront the fact that the local villagers have a better idea about what they need than you do when your entire life has been spent in rural Africa, for example, telling other people what they need. 100%. It's a big threat. So I was the UK Secretary of State for International Development.

1:00:54I was responsible for$20 billion a year budget. it. I had thousands of civil servants in embassies all over the world. And when people first proposed cash programs to us, when I first met the Michael Fay, who's the co-founder of GiveDirectly, he brought this whole amazing initiative together. I felt deeply threatened. I thought, well, what are we going to do? You know, all of us, all our civil servants, all our jobs, what happens? I mean, if it turns out that you're just going to give cash to someone, you know, how about me? I'm an agriculture expert. I'm a health expert. So you're absolutely right.

1:01:27There is something about this model which is fundamentally threatening to a whole industry, but in a good way. How did you change your mind about this? Did you just look at the numbers and that persuaded you? I know you have a Rwanda story that I'm trying to tease out of you. Yeah. So Michael Fay, who was the co-founder, drove me out to Rwanda, out to a remote rural community. And I walked into this woman's house. This is the woman I was describing with the three grandkids living on$3 cash a month. And I could not believe the poverty that she was living in. And I could not believe the difference that the cash was making.

1:02:02And back in the car, looking out of the window, I could see the difference between villagers that had received give directly assistance and those that hadn't. You could just, you saw it in the tin roofs on the houses, you saw it in the latrines, but you smelled it most of all. When you stepped out of the car, you could smell a lot of cow poo because the villagers that got give directly assistance had bought cows and they were able to manure their fields and they were able to get milk for their children. And you could just tell immediately people looked healthier, they were better fed, they were smiling more.

1:02:35It really is incredible because in absolute terms, the amount of money is not that high. I know villages range in size, but what would be the total loot drop, so to speak, for a village that makes that big of a difference? So to make a difference to an individual's life, we aim to give about$550 to an adult individual. So that might be for a household, if there were two adults there, just over$1 ,000. And a village might be 100 houses, so might be$100 ,000. And the point is that you can give at any level. The lovely thing about giving directly is, you know, my mother gives$30 a month. and she's put in direct touch with somebody and she gets updates on her$30 a month.

1:03:21And that makes a real difference to an individual's life. And then if you're wealthier, you can give it a bigger level. You can give$100 ,000 and you can transform an entire village. And if you're Elon Musk, you could, if you wanted, lift an entire country out of poverty. That's really something. I can't even imagine having that kind of power. By the way, where are you? Because I feel like I hear a call to prayer or something in the background. Am I imagining that? You know, you can hear the call to prayer. I'm talking to you from Amman in Jordan. Oh, okay. You're talking to me just before the Muslim holiday of Eid.

1:03:50And so there's a lot of singing going on from the little minaret behind my house. It's very faint, but it's kind of unmistakable. Whenever you've, if you spent one night in a country that has that, you will not forget it. Because the first time you hear it, I don't know about you, but I looked around and I was like, what the heck is that? And do I need to go to the airport right now? And at four in the morning, particularly. Yeah, exactly. When I was in Egypt, I think one of the most confusing, sort of terrifying moments was I was in rural Egypt. I'd been there for a day. I woke up after a long trip getting there on a bus.

1:04:25I heard people screaming. And I mean screaming, screaming, screaming. And I thought I was furiously packing. And then I ran downstairs to see if I should just run out without my stuff. And it turned out to be a funeral. Have you ever seen those funeral processions? Well, yes. I mean, the other thing that's very dramatic, which I don't know whether you've seen, but I saw in Pakistan and in Afghanistan is, and in Iraq, these Shia processions where people strip their shirts off and they whip themselves with knives for days. I mean, they can walk for hours. I mean, it's, and you get thousands of often young men shirtless walking down the street with blood running down their backs, whipping themselves with knives.

1:05:03It's a very, very, you know, kind of strange, for them, a very intense religious experience. but for you looking at it, a kind of very kind of uncanny, almost horrifying sight. Yeah, I've never seen, that's really, that's incredible. And there were literally a biohazard as well. I would imagine there's blood in the street after that. Yeah, there's a lot of blood in the street. The funeral procession for people who are confused, they basically hold up a huge picture of the deceased and the men are walking with it. I don't remember if the men were screaming, but the women are shrieking as if they are being stabbed.

1:05:36And it's just over and over and over loud wailing. But there's something quite cathartic about that, isn't it? I mean, I sometimes think that in our much more uptight cultures, we're missing something, that there's an immense emotional release there. And you often find that people grieve like that, these kind of formal screaming. You can see it in, as you say, many, many parts of Africa, including Egypt. But once they're through it, it's helped them to come to terms with the loss of someone they love. And maybe, you know, I feel particularly in Britain, where we're very kind of stiff upper lip, we're missing out on something there.

1:06:09It's a funny point you make about Britain. I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, when I think unemotional, I kind of go with Germany, the UK towards the top of my list for not really wanting to show your cards emotionally. The United States, we're all over the map, right? You got your Latinas in California, and they're just, you know, they're singing and dancing all over and you think it's a party, but they're just on their day at school or work. And then you've got your Asians, which is what my wife's family is. And And it's like, you can't, you couldn't pay them to showcase an emotion at a special occasion.

1:06:40It's really, we really run the gamut. But you're right. That would be jarring. I can't even imagine the blood thing, though. That's like something out of the Spanish Inquisition or something. I mean, it just reminds me of, isn't it a Catholic thing where they're doing? Yeah, exactly. The flatulence. Yes. Yeah, it's directly related to that. You're right. Which the people in Europe used to do during the plagues. They believe that if they beat themselves enough, the black death will go away. Whew, man, the world is such a fascinating place. And by the way, for people who are confused about what the call to prayer is, which kicked off this whole tangent, and correct me, Rory, because I may butcher this, but those minarets, those giant things, those towers you see from the mosque, for those who don't know, there's loudspeakers in there or a guy with a bullhorn, essentially, and they are singing, and that's where the sort of Allah Akbar, you know, and they do that, and they wake you up at 4 a.m., And it's, is it five times a day?

1:07:34Yeah, people pray five times a day. And he will be saying in Arabic, God is great. There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet. And peace be with you. And this will be coming out again and again and again. It's actually quite moving because in many of the countries in which I've worked, almost everybody does pray five times a day. And you'll remember this. You'll see people just out on the street. I'll just unroll their prayer mat, do a little bit of praying, the shopkeeper, and then I'll roll it up again and go back into the house. And it's something that in Afghanistan, I felt even for the poorest, most remote community, they felt connected to the wider world through their religion.

1:08:11They felt, okay, maybe I'm 10 days walk from the road. Maybe the women in this community never be more than two hours walk from the village in their lives. But I'm part of the Muslim ummah, I'm part of the Muslim family. And they would try to talk to me about Mecca and about pilgrimage and about Islam. And it was for them a very, very fundamental identity of being part of being a global citizen. I was a little confused by that. Are you Muslim or you were just sort of LARPing as a Muslim for safety purposes? No, no, I'm not. I'm not a Muslim. I'm a Christian. Okay. Yeah. I wondered about that. And are you religious?

1:08:44I'm not deeply religious. Although I do, I'm about to go off on an 11-day silent retreat. I do these meditation retreats, which I did twice, in fact, in the United States, in Western Massachusetts, slightly bizarre, kind of Buddhist retreats in Western Massachusetts. Those are trending right now. Do you know Yuval Noah Harari by any chance? Seems like a guy. I do know him. Yeah. He's someone I know a bit. And I do it in his tradition. Okay. And in fact, he recommended these places that I go to. I was going to say, you should connect with him because he does like two months of silence every year, which to me sounds, I'd rather be in prison.

1:09:18Yuval is a level above me. He also doesn't have small children. I think my wife would have something to say if I went off on a 40-day silent retreat. Yeah, I'm going to New York for four days and my wife is like, oh my God, how am I gonna deal with this? Can you come back a day early? If I told her I was going on a 40-day silent retreat, she'd be like, you're not coming back though, right? You're not coming back. Yeah, I think Yorval's partner is very understanding. Yeah, actually, he might really enjoy it too. I love my wife, but let's just say she could use a 40-day silent retreat or any kind of vacation for that matter.

1:09:52I know we're running out of time here. I'd like to put a little bit of a cap on this, though. I would imagine we talked about getting grain and aid. Moving cash has to be a lot more cost effective and getting more and more so just because of tech. You mentioned mobile phone payments. It just can't be that expensive to send money from the United States to Africa at scale now. It's super efficient. It's amazing. I mean, in our best programs, you can get for every$100 delivered, 90 will arrive directly on the phone. and the$10 will cover all the other costs, US costs, audit costs, anti-fraud costs, communicating with the villagers because you can literally do a direct money payment.

1:10:33Yeah, you have quite a robust follow-up program, if you will. It's like, okay, here's the money. Are you qualified for the money? Here's the money. Here's the rest of the money. Did the money work? Do you have issues? Do you have questions? And it's like multiple, multiple times as opposed to a box of cash on your doorstep, which I think is really smart. People are going to say, this sounds like a pilot for universal basic income, UBI. What do you think about that? It seems like this is the nascent beginning of something that could look like that across the whole globe. I think there are people who are enthusiasts for universal basic income who can take this as a way of us demonstrating how the model works, how it's done.

1:11:13But our beginning here with this project is not to focus on basic income every month. it's to focus on a one-time transfer to try to lift people up. Because I think we're not yet in a world in which it's realistic to expect people from Global North to pay every month to support the income of people in the Global South. And I think there are reasonable questions to ask about dependency and whether that's sustainable. So yes, absolutely. We're demonstrating the technology and the mechanisms for doing universal basic income. But actually what we're doing is a little bit different. What we're doing is transforming people's lives to a single donation where we make it clear that this isn't something that they're going to be getting every month, but which we hope will give them a chance of really improving their conditions.

1:12:00There's so much we can talk about. I mean, I'm curious if you think, just in closing here, if you think your walk would be possible now, because post 9-11, you kind of went when there was a gap between the Taliban. Iran was probably a lot more calm then than it is now. What do you think? Very sadly, I don't think it would be possible. I don't think the Iranians would give you a visa to walk across their country anymore. I doubt the Taliban would give you a visa to walk the length of their country at the moment. I think that rural India would be fine and rural Nepal would be fine. I think rural Pakistan might also be quite dangerous.

1:12:36I was lucky. And one of the sad things is the world is getting more dangerous all the time. My mother took a Land Rover from London to Kuala Lumpur in 1963. She drove right across Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, you know, all the way. Wow. Through Myanmar, through Burma. And by the time I started walking, there were bits of that you couldn't do anymore. And now for somebody listening who's 20 years younger than me, there's even more of it that you can't do. It's very sad. In many ways, as we get more prosperous as we get more wealthy in the north. Many parts of the world are actually unfortunately stuck and getting poorer and more dangerous all the time.

1:13:15Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if you could walk, depending on your citizenship, you might not even be able to walk across Russia right now. Right. And if you did, you'd have to carry money. You mentioned that it doesn't matter how much money you carry with you. How much money were you carrying with you? I got him dying to know. So I would carry about$5 ,000, which would be enough to get me across. Where did you keep it? I kept it in a money belt in the front of my trousers and I'd pull my trousers over the top of it. That's it? Oh, it was all in one place? I always thought you were gonna tell me you had it taped all to your body or something.

1:13:45No, the little bits, little, I'd have little bits hidden in the top of my backpack, little bits in the soles of my boots just in case they took the money belt, yeah. But the main thing was around my waist, yeah. So adventures in your DNA, I mean, if your mother did that in the 60s, that's really something. Why did she do that? That's highly unusual. For the same reason, Jordan, that you do all your trips, I think largely for the adventure. Indeed. Well, I see that you're sitting in the dark. I realize how late it is over there in Jordan. Thank you so much. This is fascinating. And I hope to have you on again sometime.

1:14:15Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with Danny Trejo, an ex-con turned icon featured in over 350 films and TV shows. You've seen them everywhere in Machete, Breaking Bad, Desperado, and much, much more. He's never been through acting school, which doesn't matter when you're a legend slash icon. Before becoming such a prolific star, Danny Trejo was a drug-addicted criminal hooked on heroin at age 12 who spent more than a decade in and out of prisons. Here's a quick preview.

1:14:52Once you start doing robberies and you're using heroin, the robberies become addictive. You don't know whether you're doing robberies to support your drug habit or doing drugs to support your robbery habit. I read you robbed a store with a hand grenade. This was later on. This was like we did a robbery and we ended up with this hand grenade. So I tried it and it was very simple. You know, when you hold a hand grenade and you got your hand on the pin and you ask somebody for some money, they think twice. Prison, there's only two kinds of people in prison. There's predators and there's prey. That's it.

1:15:28And you've got to decide every damn morning what are you going to be. And I know a lot of people that decide I'm prey. I don't care because I'm tired. I know a lot of people that took an elevator off the fifth tier. There's no elevator. I know a lot of people that cut their wrists. I've seen guys with all the muscles in the world get stabbed by a short Mexican in tennis shoes with a big knife. You're fighting. I don't know if I fight you. that's prison. Prison has a taste. Put one of those fake pennies, the lead one, in your mouth and keep it there. That's the taste of pressure. That's the taste of anxiety.

1:16:05That's the taste of fear. That's the taste of everything. You feel it. That's what you walk around with. And when you finally lose that taste, you've decided whether you're going to be predator or prey. That's the only way you can lose it. For more, including how Danny Trejo walked onto a Hollywood movie set as a drug counselor and left as a bona fide actor, and how Danny Trejo has managed sobriety for over 50 years and continues to help others maintain theirs, check out episode 398 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. I told you this was such a fascinating, dude, fascinating conversation. Households that didn't get transfers were also, by the way, substantially better off.

1:16:47I want to do a little research about this. They spent$334 more on average in the following year. This wasn't keeping up with the Joneses, the type of effect where they spend more and reduce saving to keep up with their peers, their savings, if anything, increased. So this spending, these families that didn't even get money seemingly was financed in large part by a substantial increase in annual income, largely from wages. So being helped in general by their peers, having more money to spend in the local economy. So as the overall regional economy expanded, both recipients and non-recipients we're better off because the transfers enabled spending that help their employers and their own businesses.

1:17:22This stuff works. It's not just aid. Of course, we all have problems with aid. I've done whole episodes on why aid is more harm than good. This is different. My episodes on aid, 794 and 795, these types of results, they don't mean that people living in poverty are always gonna be the best at deciding how money should be used. But it does raise the question why we've been trusting the vast majority of our giving to an aid industry with a very patchy track record of allocating capital. So 794 and 795, we'll link to those in the show notes. But more importantly, we are going to be helping out that village in Kenya.

1:17:58And I cannot wait. I think this is such a cool opportunity. As I mentioned during the show, starting today and continuing until September 15th, we are on a mission to lift an entire village in Kenya out of extreme poverty by delivering cash donations with no strings attached. A kind-hearted donor, they're gonna double every donation that we received during our campaign. So we're trying to hit 20 grand, which I think we're going to do quite easily. Well, I hope so. With your help, it'll magically transform into 40 grand, bringing hope to families that struggle to afford even the most basic necessities of life.

1:18:27GiveDirectly is proud to be the first NGO extending any real supportive hand towards the inhabitants of Namani. Now, this is a rural Kenyan village. The goal is to gift$1 ,000 each to all 36 families. That's 187 people residing in the village, which is as remote as it gets. So this is how bad things are, how dire things are in this village. Seven families, seven out of all 36 have a shelter, a permanent shelter. The rest of the folks are just kind of all over the place or in temporary shelters made out of natural materials. Education is$3 a semester, but over 51 % of residents do not have schooling because they can't afford it, which is just horrible.

1:19:08Medical care is often out of reach. There's no affordable transportation anywhere near the village. Access to water is erratic. The water pipes run dry for up to a week. They can't afford to buy water, so they're basically SOL during that time, and they just have to pray the water comes back on. Despite these hardships, we are very hopeful that these families are gonna utilize the cash donations to address their most urgent needs and lay the foundation for a brighter future. They're gonna be doing things like buying land for farming, covering school fees so that their kids can actually go to school, getting livestock like goats, which are capable of enduring the droughts that they're in all the time.

1:19:40They're going to improve their homes, metal roofs, concrete floors, so they're not sleeping in the mud and dealing with that. And they're gonna launch businesses, community taxi services, getting motorcycles so they can transport folks around, mobile phones so people can keep in touch and do business with other villages. Really going to be an amazing opportunity here. I can't wait to see the power of what this does. Go to givedirectly.com slash Jordan to donate. Of course, I'm donating. I would love to hit this goal, smash it, and keep on going or do this again for another village. Donations are 100 % tax deductible in the U.S.

1:20:11For those listeners not in the U.S., here's your chance to support the show. I know you always say, oh, I can't really support your sponsors. What do I do? Go to givedirectly.com slash Jordan. And if you send me a screenshot of your donation, I will happily send you a personalized video thanking you because this is a cool freaking project. And I can't wait to smash this goal with your support. All things Rory Stewart will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot. Transcripts in the show notes. Of course, our sponsors are always on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals, but please definitely check out our fundraiser at givedirectly.com slash Jordan.

1:20:47And yay, our newsletter, jordanharbinger.com slash news. Highlights and takeaways from the most popular episodes of the show going all the way back. You can also reply to me there. I'd love your feedback. jordanharbinger.com slash news. Six-minute networking on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Chase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we've rised by lifting others out of poverty in this case.

1:21:19The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, and the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the economics of this kind of thing or just wants to hear from somebody who walked across Afghanistan, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.