AI transcript
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0:01:11 Will the VP debate move the needle in what’s shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election?
0:01:14 You never know in advance what will be the thing that matters
0:01:15 and the thing that doesn’t matter.
0:01:19 But Donald Trump will be almost 80,
0:01:25 and J.D. Vance will be one cheeseburger away from the presidency should they win.
0:01:30 I’m Preet Bharara, and this week, the Atlantic magazine’s David Frum
0:01:32 joins me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet,
0:01:35 to break down what happened at the debate.
0:01:36 The episode is out now.
0:01:40 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:46 Episode 319.
0:01:47 Through and under is Erica in covering parts of Iowa.
0:01:51 1919, the U.S. ratified the 18th Amendment,
0:01:55 leading to the prohibition of alcohol, three guys walking to a bar,
0:01:59 an alcoholic, a priest, and a child molester.
0:02:02 And that’s just the first guy.
0:02:04 Go! Go! Go!
0:02:16 Welcome to the 319th episode of The Prop G Pod.
0:02:18 In today’s episode, we speak with Rory Stewart,
0:02:21 the former UK Secretary of State for International Development,
0:02:24 and co-host of the popular podcast, The Rest is Politics.
0:02:28 We discussed with Rory Geopolitics, the state of politics in the U.S. and the UK,
0:02:31 and his recent TED talk where he advocates for a radical way
0:02:35 to address extreme poverty worldwide.
0:02:40 This guy just kind of bleeds, I don’t know, the Union Jack.
0:02:43 He just struck me as so British, but kind of the good parts of Britain.
0:02:46 He’s super smart, super polite,
0:02:49 and I really enjoyed the conversation.
0:02:53 I’m trying to get down, I’m trying to be a little bit more English.
0:02:55 I’m sitting here with tea.
0:02:58 Honey, that’s great tea, tea and biscuits.
0:03:02 Anyways, enjoy our conversation with Consummit Britt,
0:03:04 center of the universe, epicenter of intellect.
0:03:08 Okay, what’s happening? Let’s get to the news.
0:03:14 The dog is home in London after drinking beer and eating sausage in Munich.
0:03:18 And I went to the Activist meeting or conference,
0:03:20 whatever it is, a friend of mine, Steve Cericino, runs the fund,
0:03:23 and I committed to speaking there.
0:03:24 By the way, just a quick trick.
0:03:27 If you ever need someone to commit to something you’re worried about them committing to,
0:03:29 ask them like six months out.
0:03:31 I pretty much commit to anything if it’s six or nine months out,
0:03:33 because it doesn’t seem real to me.
0:03:36 I think there’s a lesson for young people there,
0:03:39 and that is the present value of your emotions is incredibly higher.
0:03:40 It’s discounted at a huge rate,
0:03:44 and that is when you go out about 10 years,
0:03:47 you’re going to look back on the shit that you were really upset about right now,
0:03:50 and you’ll be able to discount it back to the reality of the situation,
0:03:54 and it’s going to seem very small or put another way.
0:03:57 This too shall pass. Don’t be too upset about things.
0:03:58 I don’t know how I got there.
0:04:00 Anyways, what else is going on?
0:04:05 Some big news from my home state of California, Governor Newsom, so handsome, so handsome.
0:04:06 He should be president.
0:04:11 Just anyone that good looking who’s not a village idiot should be president.
0:04:13 I just think it helps to have tall, good-looking people.
0:04:14 I think people take him more seriously.
0:04:19 Anyways, he vetoed SB 1047, an AI safety bill,
0:04:24 aimed to regulate the computing power used to train large artificial intelligence models.
0:04:28 Hollywood and others, including Elon Musk and Jeffrey Hinton,
0:04:31 the godfather of AI, were all for this bill.
0:04:33 So why were they for it? Simple.
0:04:38 So Jeffrey Hinton is very smart, and I think he sees and is justifiably concerned
0:04:42 about the progress of AI and thinks there should be more oversight and regulation.
0:04:48 In addition, California has a habit of leading the nation and the world on thoughtful regulation.
0:04:52 Why do I think it was good for the governor to veto this bill?
0:04:58 Okay, as far as I can tell, this bill essentially was not a bill to regulate AI.
0:05:00 It was a bill to kneecap open AI.
0:05:04 Specifically, it was legislation meant to slow down one company in particular,
0:05:08 and that’s why, quite frankly, Elon Musk was in favor of Mr. Don’t Regulate,
0:05:12 Mr. Tech Libertarian, Get Out of the Way, We’re Smarter Than Government.
0:05:17 Like this, why? Because he’s got his own AI company that is fucking nowhere so far,
0:05:21 and he wants to slow down the leader such that he can catch up.
0:05:23 I just think it’s very disingenuous.
0:05:26 Let’s break down SB 1047, the recently vetoed bill.
0:05:31 This legislation wants to mandate safety testing of AI models that require a certain level of computing power
0:05:33 and cost about $100 million to train.
0:05:36 Okay, the first part of that, there’s nothing wrong with that.
0:05:38 The second part of it, nothing wrong with it.
0:05:42 The bill required companies to add a kill switch to shut down rogue systems
0:05:47 and gave the state the power to sue AI companies if their technology caused harm.
0:05:50 All right, a kill switch makes a lot of sense to me, right?
0:05:52 I’ve never bought that this is sent in.
0:05:55 I think there is always a kill switch, and if there isn’t, they’re lying to you
0:06:00 so they can throw up their arms and say, “No, we want to continue to take ads from Nissan,
0:06:02 and we can’t stop it. Bullshit.”
0:06:05 Notice how all of a sudden Instagram has figured out a way to agegate?
0:06:09 Supposedly it was too complex. They couldn’t figure it out.
0:06:13 And then on the eve of the Kids Online Safety Act, COSA, they figured it out.
0:06:17 It’s pretty easy. They use AI to say, “Okay, clearly, this is a 13-year-old.”
0:06:20 And then when they ask you to verify your age, and it sounds like you’re lying,
0:06:23 they ask you to upload a federal ID, and boom, they have agegated.
0:06:24 What do you know they figured it out?
0:06:28 Isn’t that impressive on the eve of legislation?
0:06:29 There’s a lot of problems with this.
0:06:35 First, the language. If AI companies, if their technology causes harm, okay.
0:06:37 What does that mean, girlfriend? What does that mean?
0:06:41 Like, that’s a pretty wide truck to run shit through.
0:06:43 And I’m definitely a fan of regulating these companies,
0:06:48 but that sounds like just all sorts of class action suits right out of the gates.
0:06:51 In addition, the other thing that was a bit of a tell here
0:06:55 was that they wanted this legislation or this new law to apply to companies
0:06:58 that train over $100 million to train their LLM.
0:07:02 This sounds to me like 98% of the venture capital community
0:07:07 that has funded startups that aren’t open AI
0:07:10 to say, “We want to catch up to open AI and chat to you.”
0:07:12 That is basically running away with it, and they are running away with it.
0:07:15 They have about 70% share of an emerging market.
0:07:18 What’s interesting is just as new technologies that resonate
0:07:20 have faster kind of zero to 60 adoption time,
0:07:23 meaning they get ubiquitous adoption across the general public.
0:07:25 It’s getting shorter and shorter.
0:07:29 It took 10 years for faxes to catch on, 15 years for VCRs to catch on.
0:07:33 It took about two or three years for social media for Instagram to catch on.
0:07:36 And it gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
0:07:40 AI kind of is zero to whatever it was, 10 million users was like,
0:07:42 I don’t know, six or nine months, something crazy.
0:07:46 But just as the emergence or the adoption of these technologies
0:07:47 is happening faster and faster,
0:07:51 so is the emergence of the ultimate duopolys and monopolies that emerge.
0:07:54 Because one company jumps out ahead, has more access to cheap capital,
0:07:57 weaponizes government, soaks up the best human capital,
0:07:59 and kind of runs away with it.
0:08:01 And I think we have a duopoly emerging right now.
0:08:06 And just as Wintel was a source of huge regulatory concern
0:08:10 and probably suppressed a lot of innovation in the ’80s and ’90s,
0:08:12 I think you’re seeing a similar duopoly emerge.
0:08:14 And I’m going to call it open video.
0:08:20 And that is open AI and NVIDIA essentially control 70 and 92%
0:08:25 of the AI market and the AI processor market, respectively.
0:08:26 They’re effectively running away with it.
0:08:29 And if you look at their market capitalizations,
0:08:33 I think they’re just going to have access to a certain level of financial and human capital
0:08:37 that’ll make it hard for them or hard for anyone else to emerge and compete.
0:08:39 There’ll be niche applications, there’ll be all sorts of deals.
0:08:42 The ecosystem itself is going to make a lot of money.
0:08:45 But these guys, in my view, are running away with it.
0:08:49 And so I believe in a progressive tax structure.
0:08:51 And that is, as companies get bigger and make more money,
0:08:52 they should pay more taxes.
0:08:57 By the way, fun fact, corporations are paying their lowest tax rate since 1939
0:09:01 as a percentage of GDP, or is it just basically their tax rates?
0:09:03 Anyways, they’re not paying a lot of taxes right now.
0:09:05 So I think there should be a progressive tax structure.
0:09:09 You should make more money, your marginal tax rate should go up.
0:09:11 But I don’t believe in progressive legislation.
0:09:12 I don’t like selective legislation
0:09:16 that basically harms a certain sector within a sector and not the others.
0:09:17 I think that’s bullshit.
0:09:21 And this to me feels like that we’d like to catch up legislation.
0:09:22 So I’m glad he vetoed it.
0:09:24 He also probably had a lot of political pressure on him.
0:09:27 I did a little bit of back of the envelope math, which I like to do.
0:09:31 Let’s talk about the state budget for California.
0:09:35 The state budget, which is effectively kind of the fifth biggest nation in the world,
0:09:37 is somewhere around a quarter of a trillion dollars.
0:09:39 So what does that mean?
0:09:46 It means that 10%, 10% of California’s budget is or comes from,
0:09:53 I should say 10% of the revenues, comes from the wealth created by two companies in AI,
0:09:54 comes from the AI duopoly.
0:09:58 So you can bet the governor Newsom wakes up in the middle of the night sweating
0:10:01 and his wife turns over and says, “Gov, what’s the problem?”
0:10:03 He said, “I just had this nightmare.”
0:10:05 And she says, “All right, what’s the nightmare?”
0:10:08 And he says, “Well, I had this nightmare that Jensen Huang called me and said,
0:10:13 “I’m going to go be Elon Musk’s roommate in Austin,” or wherever the fuck is in Texas,
0:10:18 because if these companies leave California, you’re talking about a budget hole being blown
0:10:23 the size of a very big hole in the California budget.
0:10:28 The governor noted that 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies are located in the great
0:10:29 state of California.
0:10:30 Can you believe that?
0:10:35 California has a 64% share of AI companies, and I bet by market capitalization,
0:10:39 it’s 80 or 90%, maybe not that much, because Microsoft’s in Seattle.
0:10:39 I don’t know.
0:10:40 I need to think that through.
0:10:42 I need to think that through.
0:10:46 According to the legislative analyst’s office in 2023, just four major tech companies,
0:10:52 Apple, Google, Metta, and NVIDIA accounted for more than 6% of the state’s total income tax
0:10:53 revenue.
0:10:53 I don’t know what is it.
0:10:54 Cap gains.
0:10:55 I just did that math.
0:11:02 Anyways, this is, in my opinion, incredibly important that we think about getting this
0:11:08 right and trying to balance growth and tax revenue and innovation and jobs with some
0:11:14 sense or some recognition or nod to the fact that not regulating social media and technology
0:11:17 has turned basically an entire generation into addicts.
0:11:18 What do I mean by that?
0:11:22 Just as they’re going through puberty and their brain is getting wired, we are teaching
0:11:24 them to constantly need dopa.
0:11:30 Once they get to a certain age, they’re going to find means of that constant dopa hit through
0:11:32 other means that’ll be pretty unhealthy.
0:11:37 I think you’re going to see addiction, absolutely skyrocket, and it’s going to be reverse engineered
0:11:43 to who are the drug dealers sitting outside of junior high school selling snacks, specifically
0:11:48 Satchinadella, specifically Cinderpichai, and Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg.
0:11:49 Yeah, I said it.
0:11:51 Tim Cook sitting outside of junior high school selling fucking smack.
0:11:53 That is what’s going on here.
0:11:55 These companies need to agegate their devices.
0:12:00 There’s no reason a 16-year-old should have a smartphone or much less be on social
0:12:00 media.
0:12:05 Moving on, California is also in the news for banning legacy and donor admissions at private
0:12:08 universities, including Stanford University, USC, and others.
0:12:11 This ban will take effect in the fall of 2025.
0:12:12 What are legacy admissions?
0:12:15 It’s a practice where certain applicants are given special consideration
0:12:18 because of family or other connections to the school.
0:12:22 Public universities, including the University of California and California State Universities,
0:12:24 have long banned legacy admissions.
0:12:27 So as usual, UC is way out in front of everybody.
0:12:31 By the way, the University of California did away with race-based affirmative action in 1997,
0:12:37 26 years ago, 27 years ago, and went to an adversity score saying, “All right,
0:12:40 if you’re the daughter of an Indian private equity billionaire, you don’t need any help.
0:12:45 But if you’re a white kid from Appalachia from a single parent family and your
0:12:48 mom’s incarcerated, maybe we take that into account.”
0:12:52 And that is absolutely the right way to implement affirmative action.
0:12:54 I’m a beneficiary of affirmative action.
0:12:55 I got Pell Grants.
0:12:56 My mother was a secretary.
0:12:58 She never made more than $40,000 a year.
0:13:03 And that financial aid, that unfair advantage, that discrimination in my favor,
0:13:07 paid off for everybody, which takes me back to legacy admissions.
0:13:09 Legacy admissions actually do have an upside.
0:13:14 And that is they create more affinity, more affection, and greater donors for that school.
0:13:18 And I believe, if you were to say, “Okay, on legacy admissions, we’ll give your kid a leg up.”
0:13:22 But, but we’re going to charge him or her more.
0:13:23 I think you just go straight capitalist here.
0:13:26 The problem, remember Varsity Blues where all those people got stuck in jail,
0:13:31 where Aunt Becky got stuck in jail for paying someone half a million bucks to get her kids
0:13:33 in to pretend that she was a rower?
0:13:34 By the way, I did it entirely wrong.
0:13:36 I went to UCLA and then started rowing.
0:13:37 That made no sense.
0:13:40 Anyways, my attitude is let’s go full capitalist.
0:13:43 These universities, my friends, we’re whores.
0:13:44 Let’s be clear.
0:13:47 But we’re expensive whores that like to think that we’re not whores.
0:13:48 What do I mean by that?
0:13:53 Aunt Becky didn’t go to jail for giving a half a million dollars to get her kid into school.
0:13:56 She went to jail for not giving five million.
0:13:59 In other words, if Aunt Becky had called and said, “Hi, USC.
0:14:01 I’ll give you not even five million.
0:14:02 I’ll give you two million dollars.”
0:14:05 They put Becky’s name.
0:14:08 They’d be like growing pains or whatever the fuck that show was called on the side of a building.
0:14:11 The growing pain center for media and her kid would have got in.
0:14:16 But because she cheaped out and paid someone outside the university half a million dollars,
0:14:20 they called the FBI and the FBI got involved in trying to send a message to a lot of rich
0:14:21 people that this is not cool.
0:14:25 And I get why people think this is wrong.
0:14:26 I get it.
0:14:26 I get it.
0:14:28 But be clear, folks.
0:14:30 We’re still letting in the children of rich people.
0:14:31 They got tutors.
0:14:34 They have access to the industrial tutoring complex.
0:14:35 They have friends on the board.
0:14:36 They get the better recs.
0:14:37 So what do we do?
0:14:39 We take some of that money.
0:14:39 Sure, charge them more.
0:14:41 Your legacy, fine.
0:14:43 We need you to give money and we need you to pay more.
0:14:49 And then we’re going to use that money to offer more seats such that we can let in more kids.
0:14:56 If you had a pill, then when someone took it, made them less likely to be depressed,
0:15:00 less likely to kill themselves, less likely to kill other people, more likely to run for
0:15:04 president, more likely to vote, more likely to get married, more likely to pay a shit ton
0:15:08 of taxes, more likely to be millionaires, less likely to be obese, less likely to be
0:15:11 diabetic, less likely to be incarcerated.
0:15:15 Would you say, I’m not going to give that pill to 91% of the people who want it?
0:15:17 That’s what UCLA does.
0:15:23 Higher ed is the pill, is the treatment, is the ointment, is the pharmaceutical that makes
0:15:24 people’s lives better.
0:15:27 Case in point, the guy on this fucking podcast.
0:15:29 Why are we hoarding it?
0:15:36 So I can feel good about myself and the dean of NYU Stern stands up and says we rejected 85%
0:15:37 of our applicants.
0:15:42 That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging that he or she turned away
0:15:44 nine in people that showed up last night.
0:15:48 We are, we are public servants, not fucking Chanel bags.
0:15:52 We’ll be right back for our conversation with Rory Stewart.
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0:19:18 Welcome back.
0:19:22 Here’s our conversation with Rory Stewart, the former U.K. Secretary of State for
0:19:26 International Development and co-host of the popular podcast, The Rest Is Politics.
0:19:28 Rory, what does this podcast find you?
0:19:30 I have just got to London.
0:19:35 So, in your recently released head talk, you advocate for a radical way to address extreme
0:19:38 poverty worldwide, giving cash directly to people in poverty.
0:19:43 Give us that pitch for why we should just be giving people in poverty just straight up cash.
0:19:47 Just before we get into the nub of it, I think the important thing is to understand that there
0:19:51 are basically two models in the world, and it’s caught up in this phrase,
0:19:56 teach someone to fish they can eat for lifetime, give them a fish they eat for a day.
0:20:01 And a lot of the fashion in international development, for very understandable reasons,
0:20:06 has been not about giving people things, but instead about giving them training,
0:20:07 knowledge, capacity building.
0:20:16 And cash is very radical because it’s an action of radical humility or essentially saying,
0:20:19 these people have a better idea about their lives and priorities than I do,
0:20:24 and I’m going to get out of the way and give them what they really want, which is cash.
0:20:28 Now, why does it work? And this, we can get into the evidence on it.
0:20:32 The evidence is very striking, hundreds of randomized control trials demonstrating the
0:20:38 impact. My guess for why it works is that firstly, it’s much more flexible.
0:20:44 I think the second thing that it does quite powerfully is it’s generally much more efficient.
0:20:49 I mean, if I give you the cash to fix your own roof in a very poor community,
0:20:53 you can probably get it done for about $150. If I bring in a non-profit,
0:20:58 we’d have to bring in engineers, we’d survey your house, we’d procure your roof,
0:21:01 we’d do all these studies, and we’d end up spending many thousands of dollars,
0:21:04 almost certainly for similar impact.
0:21:11 And then I guess somewhere at the bottom of it is the sense that in many cases,
0:21:16 people already have the knowledge. They already know what business they want to run.
0:21:18 They just lack the capital to get that business off the ground.
0:21:23 So those three things together, I think, are the ingredients that makes cash so effective.
0:21:29 Your comments, I mean, I think true insight is when you state the obvious, but you weren’t,
0:21:32 it wasn’t obvious to you before you heard it. And your comments really resonate because I
0:21:40 equated a little bit to, there’s a DEI apparatus that’s propped up or popped up across every
0:21:46 university in America. And I would argue that it was, these apparatus were apparatus, whatever
0:21:51 its term is, were desperately needed. 60 years ago, 12 black people at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
0:21:54 That was an issue. We needed departments to focus on the issue.
0:21:59 Now they have huge apparatus of very well-paid people, a lot of resources.
0:22:04 Harvard’s freshman class is 51% non-white. But these apparatus never go away.
0:22:10 And the way I relate it back to this is all of these non-profits represent a lot of jobs and
0:22:14 a lot of people who make good livings and feel important and feel like they’re doing good work
0:22:19 and have a vested interest in, quite frankly, obstructing a simpler
0:22:25 solution is devising it or positioning it as crass or is not that effective. And
0:22:30 do you see what I’ll call the non-profit infrastructure sort of getting in the way
0:22:34 and being intellectually dishonest about how effective this would be?
0:22:43 Yes. And I was part of that. I mean, I was the UK Secretary of State, so I was the minister
0:22:48 in charge of this $20 billion a year budget and thousands of civil servants doing international
0:22:55 development. And I remember when people first brought this idea of cash to me that I said half
0:23:00 joking, listen, what’s going to happen to all of us, right? There are thousands of us employed,
0:23:04 managing, we’ve all done master’s degrees in agricultural economics. We’re going to be experts
0:23:09 on health programs and remote parts of Liberia. If we’re just giving people cash, what about all
0:23:15 us, right? I realize that it’s a sort of strange thing when you’re inside a bureaucracy. I’m only
0:23:21 half joking. And the fact that that’s my immediate reaction suggests something quite strange about
0:23:27 the way that the mind of the bureaucrat works. So the majority of our listeners are in the U.S.
0:23:32 and for those of you who don’t know, Rory is the co-host of what is probably, I would argue,
0:23:36 the best politics podcast in the world right now called The Rest is Politics. I’m going to ask you
0:23:40 to do something that is nearly impossible, but if you were to give Americans who have
0:23:47 little or no sense of U.K. politics over the last 10 years, can you give us the cliff notes
0:23:52 on what has happened in the U.K. and what you think it represents and what have been the major
0:23:58 sort of shifts around leadership and what the populace has decided and where you think the U.K.
0:24:08 is headed politically, if you will. So I think the first really big date is 2005, when 2005 the
0:24:14 British economy is still bigger than the Chinese economy, not very long ago. That’s crazy. That’s
0:24:20 a great start. It’s amazing. 19 years ago, the U.K. had a bigger economy in China. Yeah. And now the
0:24:26 Chinese economy is about seven times as. So that’s the first big fact. Our relative power in the
0:24:31 world has changed very dramatically. And it’s concealed from us because we’ve gone from being
0:24:35 the fourth largest economy in the world to being the fifth largest economy in the world. But in
0:24:42 relative terms, the shift has been off the scale. Second date, I think is 2010, when a conservative
0:24:47 government was elected, which has been in for the last 14 years and was only finally kicked out by a
0:24:53 more left-wing labor government that came in just in an election just under 100 days ago. And they
0:25:00 came in off the financial crisis, and their watchword was austerity. So they tried to reduce the
0:25:07 debt and deficit. They cut government spending very dramatically. And there’s, as you can imagine,
0:25:12 a huge argument between conservatives and people on the other side about whether that was the right
0:25:19 thing to do for the economy or not. Next date, 2016, Britain votes to leave the European Union.
0:25:26 And that removes us from being part of a single marketer customs union with our
0:25:34 largest trading partner. Next date, I guess, that matters is 2020, when we get into one of the most
0:25:40 aggressive COVID lockdowns in the world, far more so than the US. I mean, people were kind
0:25:44 of shopping their neighbors for gathering in groups and more than three at a barbecue outdoors.
0:25:51 And we’re still calculating the cost of that, but it probably costs the British government
0:25:57 about £400 million, which is a significant, sorry, £400 billion. I’m sorry, I got a thousand,
0:26:04 a thousand off that £400 billion. So a really significant chunk of government expenditure
0:26:09 annually is about a trillion. So about 40% of annual government expenditure was spent on the COVID
0:26:18 response. And then the final thing has been demography. So when we set up our welfare state
0:26:22 before the First World War, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today, there
0:26:28 are just under three working people for every one retired person. We’re living longer and longer.
0:26:33 We have a cradle to grave healthcare system that’s getting more and more expensive. In fact,
0:26:39 about 3% more expensive every year than inflation because of aging and the cost of drugs.
0:26:45 And our economic growth has been anemic. Our productivity has been flat since the financial
0:26:52 crisis. And you can imagine as a result of all of that, you have a pretty cross population
0:26:56 and a new government that’s come in feeling it doesn’t have many options because unlike the US,
0:26:59 it’s not the world’s reserve currency. It can’t go and borrow a huge amount.
0:27:05 Describe what you think will be the biggest changes of this new administration relative to the
0:27:10 conservatives over the last 14 years. Well, it’s very difficult to see that at the moment.
0:27:17 I mean, it’s very cosmetic. They’re closer to the unions and they’ve given significant public
0:27:21 sector pay rises as soon as they came in, which of course has made the conservatives
0:27:26 sort of delighted because it plays into their kind of cliches about left-wing governments.
0:27:32 They have however stuck with most of the spending reductions. They’ve promised not to increase
0:27:37 taxes. They’ve promised not to increase borrowing. How do they do that? If they’re going to increase
0:27:42 wages, how do they not increase the deficit of taxes? They’ve cut investment and that again
0:27:46 is pretty troubling. I mean, they’ve stopped most of the rail and road investment. They’ve just
0:27:50 canceled a big supercomputer that was being built in Edinburgh. They’ve announced they’re not going
0:27:56 ahead with big programs to rebuild hospitals. So I think they’re in trouble. I mean, this is a
0:28:02 left-wing government that’s come in after 14 years in which the British public are fed up with
0:28:07 austerity and want more investment in public services. It’s a government that is trying to
0:28:11 reassure the financial markets and felt that the only way of winning the election was to promise
0:28:16 it would never put taxes up, but now finds itself having won a big majority with its hands tied
0:28:23 behind its back by this promise. So what I’d like to do is I want to give you some observations
0:28:29 of a bystander and that as an American who’s lived in London for two years and as a means of
0:28:34 contrasting or using it as a jumping out point for contrasting the US and the little I understand
0:28:39 about the UK, but I’ll give you some observations and I want you to respond to them. The first is
0:28:43 to the upside. As an American here, as someone who’s concerned themselves are progressive,
0:28:49 I find all the dumb arguments in the UK have been put in the past. Assault weapons, well,
0:28:53 of course we don’t have assault weapons, bodily autonomy for women. Well, it’s not even a
0:28:59 conversation or of course women in bodily autonomy. Trans rights, okay, fine. It’s not a big issue
0:29:02 for us. We’re not going to spend a ton of political capital worrying about a second or a third
0:29:09 bathroom. So I really appreciate that about the UK. My observation is that, and this is a question,
0:29:14 I’m genuinely flummoxed by the amount of intellectual property here, the amount of
0:29:20 intellectual capital, the unbelievable quality of the education system. The thing I love most
0:29:24 about the UK is my kids’ schools. I just think they’re fantastic. And I think the universities
0:29:29 here are incredible. I’ve had the good privilege or the good fortune to speak at a bunch of them,
0:29:37 just such incredibly bright people. An amazing culture, a rule of fair play, smart, funny,
0:29:44 and appreciation for the arts, a global culture that appreciates other cultures. And yet they
0:29:51 can’t get out of their own goddamn way. And when I look at London, I think there’s no organic value
0:29:58 creation. The only people I know making money here are serving money made elsewhere. Do you agree
0:30:05 with this? That Britain, the UK still has all the pillars to be just a robust high growth
0:30:13 leadership economy and manages to steal victory from the jaws of defeat. I don’t know why
0:30:19 your thoughts. It’s obviously the central question of British politics. And there’s a lot
0:30:29 of different ideology goes into trying to answer that question. Some of it is cultural. So we have
0:30:35 a big problem with developing technology and ideas and then struggling to finance it. And that seems
0:30:42 to be partly about the risk capital in the UK. I think another thing is that we have really
0:30:49 struggled to unlock the potential of anything outside London and the Southeast. We’ve created a
0:30:53 very unequal economy and some of that is about infrastructure investment. If we had decent
0:30:59 rail and road infrastructure connecting Leeds and Manchester, we would create pretty impressive
0:31:04 urban conurbation and we might be able to generate some serious productivity. Productivity in London
0:31:09 and the Southeast is so far ahead of the rest of the country. And then we get into ideology. I think
0:31:18 we’re too centralized. We should decentralize more. I think we’ve got really in our way when it
0:31:23 comes to planning and building things. I mean, one kilometer a road, one mile a road costs twice
0:31:29 as much to build as what it does in France. We’re struggling to build housing and a lot of that is
0:31:36 because we have this very, very consensual planning system where people discuss everything for years
0:31:43 and every newt and argument good and bad for why houses shouldn’t be built ahead and very little
0:31:50 gets off the ground. So now do the US. You’re a very thoughtful guy. Give us your no mercy,
0:31:57 no malice view of the situation in America. I’m married to an American. I have been teaching at
0:32:05 Yale. So what does the European notice looking at the US? I think one thing is you have a really
0:32:10 magical economy. I mean, there’s something astonishing about what’s happened in the
0:32:15 last 14 years in terms of the divergence from the eurozone. We were almost level pegging in GDP
0:32:24 per capita 14, 15 years ago and US growth rates have shot off. And you’re doing it in a way that
0:32:30 doesn’t really make sense to us. If I was being rude about the US, your state education system
0:32:35 is terrible. I mean, I’ve just been in Chicago. The statistics from Cook County are beyond
0:32:40 belief. The majority of people graduating high school who should not be in any position to
0:32:45 graduate high school in terms of their literacy and numeracy rates. And theoretically, when we
0:32:50 model these things, smart people like you tell us that the way to create productivity is to have a
0:32:56 great education system and all these people coming through. But my goodness, apart from the top,
0:33:01 apart from the kind of the cream of America, these incredible Ivy League universities,
0:33:08 the mass of people are not receiving good education. And you know, God, we’re also completely puzzled
0:33:14 by healthcare and welfare. We’re very puzzled by the fact that it just seems so rich, but also so
0:33:19 poor. I mean, go up and down the Connecticut shoreline, there are just boats everywhere.
0:33:24 I mean, you have tens of millions of people who are astonishingly wealthy, and then
0:33:29 you have people living in Flint, Michigan or in Georgia in conditions that we couldn’t imagine
0:33:33 in Europe. So those are the kinds of things that puzzle us. And I think one of the things
0:33:40 that puzzles us most probably is that an election in Europe, in the UK or Europe, would be talking
0:33:47 about the state education system. It would be talking about public health and health delivery.
0:33:54 That doesn’t seem to be what’s dominating the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
0:33:59 at all. Do you have kids, Rory? Yeah, I’ve got two boys. Two boys, how old? Nine and seven.
0:34:05 You’re in the golden decade, four to 14 are wonderful. Zero to four, we pretend to like it,
0:34:10 we don’t. Once they turn 14, they stop, you know, they no longer look up to you, you become just
0:34:16 this awful person that just warrants eye rolls about 12 times a day. You’re in the golden decade.
0:34:29 My question is where, if they said dad aged 18 to 38, kind of the years starting my career,
0:34:32 getting going, would you want them to live in the US or the UK and why?
0:34:38 At the moment, I’d probably be tempted by them living in the US, I’m afraid. And it’s a terrible
0:34:43 thing to say because I’ve dedicated my whole life to Britain. I was a British politician. I
0:34:50 love this country. I have huge emotional investment in it. But it feels to me as though we are really
0:34:59 lost at the moment. And that’s an awful thing to say. But I’m afraid I understand why so many
0:35:03 people around the world want their children to move to the US. I mean, it just feels as though
0:35:08 there’s more space to come back to the old cliche that there’s more opportunity.
0:35:16 But I hope I’m proved wrong. I hope we can find our way through this malaise and that over the
0:35:22 next decade, we can get the UK back into a situation where I can say this is where our ancestors
0:35:27 are buried. This is where my house is. This is where our roots are and let’s make a go of it.
0:35:32 You described democracy as increasingly fragile. What do you believe are the key
0:35:38 threats to democracy today? I think the first fundamental threat is that liberal democracies
0:35:45 haven’t been delivering well enough for people. I mean, that for about 200 years from the early
0:35:51 1800s, we could tell a story where we convinced ourselves that democracies were naturally more
0:35:57 prosperous. And as people became more prosperous, they became more democratic. And partly because of
0:36:03 the rise of China, but partly because the success of other authoritarian regimes, we’ve broken the
0:36:09 link in which democracies are not necessarily delivering for people. And in certain years,
0:36:13 it feels as though non-democratic states are delivering quite effectively. So that’s one problem.
0:36:19 I think the second, and that is a big problem because I think the reason why people buy into
0:36:24 democracy is not only because they believe in human rights and liberal values, it’s also because
0:36:32 it was making them wealthier. I think the second threat is I’m afraid social media. I think it’s
0:36:38 not a coincidence that the rise of social media from 2003, 2004 onwards and its explosion with
0:36:44 the Arab Spring in 2010, 2011 is part of the story of the rise of populism and the rise of
0:36:51 authoritarianism because I think those are algorithms that drive people into polarized states. And I
0:36:58 think they have been extremely bad for the key bits of democratic discourse in particular,
0:37:03 compromise, meeting in the middle, explaining, having a shared frame of reference.
0:37:09 What in your view is the impact on the UK and Europe of a Trump or a Harris presidency?
0:37:16 Harris presidency, I think, doesn’t trouble people too much. It feels like a continuity
0:37:21 of what went before Biden. And we feel we sort of got a measure of where Joe Biden was coming from.
0:37:28 Trump presidency, I think, is going to be more troubling for people because it will encourage
0:37:36 populists like Viktor Orban in Hungary or Marine Le Pen, who’s this far-right politician running to
0:37:41 be the president of France to feel that they’re entering a new age of strong men or strong women.
0:37:48 We would be worried that he would pretty quickly compromise with Putin in a way that would
0:37:54 effectively give Putin power over Kiev. We would be concerned that
0:38:00 understandable American tendencies towards isolationism and protectionism would accelerate.
0:38:08 And we’d find ourselves facing significant trade barriers and that the world, as a result,
0:38:13 would get less stable and less prosperous. We’ll be right back.
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0:39:29 So you brought up some geopolitics. I apologize for skipping around so much here,
0:39:32 but while you’re here, I want to take advantage of this. I’d love to just get your quick thoughts
0:39:42 on the war in Britain’s role or non-role in the Ukraine-Russia war. Ukraine-Russia
0:39:52 has flipped on its head in three very dramatic ways. Initially, nobody expected Russia to go
0:39:57 into Ukraine, and they thought Russia was going to definitely take Kiev. Then they got optimistic
0:40:02 about a counteroffensive, and now we’re in a situation where the Russian economy is growing
0:40:06 fast. They seem to be able to mobilize a lot of people, and they seem to have a lot of missiles.
0:40:16 Ukraine’s survival is dependent on the UK, Europe, but above all the US, putting in tens of
0:40:22 billions of dollars a year, and being prepared to do that again next year. It’s also dependent
0:40:28 on our willingness to take risk in terms of allowing Ukraine to use weapons against Russian
0:40:34 territory and making the very difficult calculation of how Putin’s going to respond to that,
0:40:38 right the way through to whether he’s going to launch tactical nuclear weapons as part of a
0:40:51 response that. So I think we were right to fight. I think had we allowed Putin to simply walk into
0:40:56 Ukraine, a world that was already getting more and more dangerous would get significantly more
0:41:02 dangerous. In fact, I think the failure to respond in 2014 in Crimea, the failure to hold out red
0:41:08 lines in Syria as part of the reason we’re in this trouble. But equally, it’s obvious to all of us
0:41:15 that there needs to be a peace deal, that it’s not credible that Ukraine is going to be able to
0:41:20 achieve all the objectives that its supporters have, and I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine,
0:41:25 but that there needs to be some kind of negotiation. The only hope is that they can
0:41:29 do that negotiation from positional strength and momentum rather than from positional weakness.
0:41:31 The war on the Middle East?
0:41:39 War on the Middle East. Well, I think that too much of what Israel is doing is driven by Netanyahu’s
0:41:47 attempt to hold his coalition together and in particular hold Smotrych and Ben Kavir on the
0:41:54 far right of his coalition on side rather than actual calculation about what is likely to lead
0:41:59 to a more peaceful, stable situation for Israel. What would that be? Let me just press pause there.
0:42:05 What if you felt there was a more thoughtful administration? What do you think, what does
0:42:12 that look like? Well, it has to move very, very quickly towards reconstructing Gaza,
0:42:19 and it has to move very quickly towards some sort of path for political autonomy for Palestine.
0:42:26 It has to balance that with Israel’s security. Now, that’s not easy to do, but we had recipes
0:42:32 for what that might look like in the mid-1990s. We still had those recipes in the mid-2000s and
0:42:42 killing 40,000 people in Gaza and levelling that place. I mean, it’s destroyed and now
0:42:48 launching these attacks into Lebanon don’t seem to me to be part of a long-term plan.
0:42:52 I don’t see where that goes in five or 10 years’ time. I don’t see how that
0:43:01 gets anybody to a situation of stability. I’m afraid with the critics of Netanyahu on this,
0:43:07 I don’t think his objectives, his strategic objectives are achievable. I don’t think he can
0:43:13 eliminate Hamas. I definitely don’t think he can eliminate Hezbollah. If he can’t,
0:43:19 he needs to find a path towards coexistence, however difficult that is.
0:43:28 So just to play a kind of steel man this, so with respect to launching this offensive,
0:43:33 I forget the words used against Lebanon, what would you say to people who say, “Well,
0:43:37 Lebanon has fired 8,500 missiles into Israel over the last 10 years. This war has been going on a
0:43:43 while and that the only way to have some sort of stable peace is to quite frankly terrorize the
0:43:47 terrorists and have a preemptive strike.” Because it’s not as if, I mean, I’m thinking about the
0:43:52 pager detonations, it’s not as if these folks were trying, hoping to give peace a chance and seem
0:43:58 to be really open and biased towards a peace deal. I feel like it’s a very American thing that,
0:44:04 okay, we need peace, we need a ceasefire, versus recognizing throughout history the only way you
0:44:10 kind of get, in my opinion, a stable peace through a war is to win it. And that a lot of what Israel
0:44:16 is doing right now is, in my view, I think Netanyahu’s been diabolical in a disaster for Israel.
0:44:27 But at the same time, I think the response in Gaza has been fully warranted and that the collateral
0:44:36 damage there is horrific, but is on a civilian to combatant ratio more humane or less inhumane
0:44:43 than any recent war that the West has prosecuted. And it strikes me that when the media says that
0:44:49 Israel has escalated the war in Lebanon, I see them as trying to de-escalate future conflict by
0:44:56 going after an incredibly precise anti-terrorist operation, in my view, trying to preempt a
0:44:59 future war that threatens their very existence. Your thoughts?
0:45:07 Well, that’s definitely the view of the people who back it. I just don’t think it works. I don’t
0:45:15 understand how they think this is going to deal with 20,000 armed and highly experienced
0:45:23 Hezbollah veterans who have formed up over 40 years, who fought in Syria, who have 10 times the
0:45:29 number of weapons they had in 2004, including precision-guided munitions, short of a ground
0:45:36 assault into Lebanon, they’re never going to be able to tackle that. And I think a ground assault
0:45:42 into Lebanon is beyond them. I think it’s beyond Israeli capacity, because Hezbollah is a much
0:45:49 more formidable enemy than Hamas and their positions in Lebanon are incomparably more
0:45:57 difficult to attack. So they can blow up pages and they can destroy some missiles. But
0:46:09 the idea that that is going to win a victory, in a way, the logic of your argument would require
0:46:16 them to win a victory so decisive that there’s no coming back. But they can’t do that. They don’t have
0:46:21 those resources. They don’t have the manpower to do that. They don’t have an option of wiping
0:46:24 Hezbollah off the face of the map.
0:46:29 But let’s talk about what are the options to just sit and take it and hope that the
0:46:35 Americans of the West come in with some sort of diplomacy. I agree this is a much more
0:46:40 formidable fighting force. I guess what are the options here?
0:46:47 The options from the very beginning of the State of Israel have been very difficult. This
0:46:55 is a situation in which Israel was created out of conflict and war and has existed through
0:47:04 conflicts and war ever since. That has been the situation since the 1930s. And I guess,
0:47:09 do I think that there is a military end to that? No.
0:47:18 No. I think the situation was best in the mid 1990s when they were getting towards an
0:47:23 accommodation and when they were trying to be serious about what a two-state solution would be.
0:47:29 But I think this path of backing the settlers, backing people and the…
0:47:38 I mean, remember, Smotrych and Ben Gavir don’t want the existing boundaries of Israel.
0:47:41 They don’t even want the existing boundaries of Israel plus the settlements.
0:47:49 They have a vision of a historic Israel from the Bible which involves displacing and occupying
0:47:56 much, much more territory. So there’s no path there.
0:48:02 I feel like it’s unfair to say that without acknowledging that they’re surrounded by people
0:48:05 whose only constitutional amendment is the extermination of Jews.
0:48:11 So it’s one thing to have… I think there’s some outright, far-right bigots on the Knesset.
0:48:16 I think it’s been a disaster for Israel. Oversettlements. 100% I’m with you.
0:48:21 But meanwhile, the only thing I can see resembling a constitution or a mission or a purpose statement
0:48:27 about the Houthis and Hamas is the elimination of Israel and the extermination of Jews.
0:48:35 So that to me, one is awful practices on the part of a government or society.
0:48:41 Another is a genocidal death cult. And it strikes me that this piece we’re talking about that we’d
0:48:47 like, it takes two to tango. My sense is that Israel and the West have come to the table with
0:48:51 some semblance of an offer that Hamas has said they’re not interested in.
0:49:00 Well, there’s many things to unpack there. One is Netanyahu who’s not been serious about any offer.
0:49:06 He has no interest in these peace deals. The more fundamental thing, this is a horrible
0:49:09 thing to talk about, and it’s very difficult to talk about sensitively.
0:49:19 But I guess the question is, what is it exactly that Israel is worried about that they’re trying
0:49:25 to deal with here? There was an extreme barbaric horrifying atrocity in October.
0:49:33 But what actually happened there? What actually happened there was a pretty low tech assault
0:49:39 across a very poorly defended border with the Israeli army and security intelligence services,
0:49:45 I’m afraid, not competently defending that border. If you’re trying to fix that problem,
0:49:50 there is a hell of a lot that you could have done to prevent that assault happening.
0:49:58 And for the last 30 years, there’s been no evidence that Hamas and Hisbollah
0:50:04 posed an existential threat to the survival of Israel, nor what happened horrifying though it was,
0:50:11 was not an existential threat to the survival of Israel. What happened was a brutal horrifying
0:50:16 terrorist assault with all that went with it. And that’s something that could have been dealt with
0:50:21 I’m afraid, by reasonable military security intelligence procedures at a border.
0:50:28 This is also where I disagree with the US’s approach to 9/11. I don’t think 9/11 was an
0:50:34 existential threat to the United States. And I think the way to deal with it is to improve your
0:50:41 intelligence security procedures, not to think that you can somehow solve the problem once and
0:50:46 for all by invading someone else’s country. So you are being intellectually honest. I would
0:50:50 argue that you’re sort of blaming the victim and the second worst day in Jewish history since
0:50:57 the Holocaust does warrant a response. And to your point, when 2800 Americans were killed,
0:51:03 we went on to kill 400,000 Iraqis and Afghanis. And I would argue that in some ways that conflict
0:51:08 set the stage for what’s going on now. And that is an unchecked Iran, because we’ve taken out the
0:51:14 buffer of Iraq. So I agree with you to have the viewpoint you have on Israel would need to require
0:51:20 a similar response on what you feel is probably an over-response from the US.
0:51:24 A crazy response after 9/11. It made no response. I mean, the problem is,
0:51:31 this is too emotionally charged for people on every side. I mean, people have lost relatives,
0:51:35 they’ve seen images of rape and murder and there are hostages being kept.
0:51:42 So nobody’s going to want to think about this in objective terms. Nobody wants to think about
0:51:47 the long term. Nobody, people want revenge. And they want to believe the fantasy that there is
0:51:51 something that you can do that can guarantee this can never happen again. But the world
0:51:57 isn’t like that. And that region isn’t like that. And the same will be true on the Palestinian side.
0:52:04 What they see is 40,000 people killed and women and children dead. And they’re not interested
0:52:08 in having any conversation around this either, because everybody is too traumatized.
0:52:16 I want to move to something lighter. I don’t want to end on that. So I don’t know how to segue
0:52:21 out of this. I’m going to ask you two very, very trivial questions. The first is we’re going back
0:52:25 to our sons. We have a lot of young men who listen to this podcast, a lot of new dads.
0:52:32 What are your observations around parenting being a good partner and being a good father?
0:52:39 I think it’s very easy to say that you acknowledge that your children
0:52:45 are different to you. But in practice, it’s very difficult to lift that out. I mean, the great
0:52:51 wisdom is that these are very different human beings with very different characters and minds,
0:52:59 and they’re going to find their own paths. But there is so much in our parenting, which is about
0:53:04 trying to model the parenting that we received or repeat the parenting we received or
0:53:11 to try to make kids do things which we enjoyed or read books which we like reading or become the
0:53:16 kind of people that we either were or even worse trying to become the kind of people we wished
0:53:24 we were. So getting out of their way and getting the balance between really testing them, challenging
0:53:32 them, pushing them, but also accepting when they’re not going to be very good at something,
0:53:35 acknowledge when they’re not going to enjoy something. I mean, I’m struggling with this
0:53:39 in my seven-year-old at the moment. I’m obsessed with reading books. I read books all the time.
0:53:43 He tells me he doesn’t really like reading books. So we’re in a continual
0:53:49 standoff where I, of course, say to myself, “Oh, he just says that, and I just need to find the
0:53:54 right book for him.” So the poor boy is now buried under 200 different books that I’ve
0:53:59 tried to produce in the hope that I can. And I come up with every kind of bribe and trick
0:54:03 and story to try to get him to do these things. Maybe at some point, I have to acknowledge that
0:54:06 he actually, when he says he wants to play football instead of reading a book, he genuinely does
0:54:10 want to play football instead of reading a book. Let me just say it gets worse.
0:54:19 I have the same issue around, I would really like to inspire my kids to get their face out of
0:54:23 other phones and to read more. And for me, it was in junior high school, this great book series
0:54:27 called “The Great Brain” about a young kid who is smart and funny. Do you know this?
0:54:29 Oh, I’m going to write that down.
0:54:34 That was wonderful. It was just really fun. It was about a kid in, I think, 19th century
0:54:39 middle America, and just his adventures and how he was always kind of, I know,
0:54:45 was kind of very mark twain like. And then as I got into high school, I started reading John Irving,
0:54:50 and I just thought that was so wonderful. Anyways, your turn. What, if I were to try
0:54:55 and put a book in front of my 17 or 14 year old that might inspire them or reignite them,
0:54:57 their interest in reading, what are two or three titles you would recommend?
0:55:06 Well, I think getting people into really good short detective and spy fiction is a great way
0:55:13 of developing people’s literary tastes and skills while having fun. So I think Michael Connolly,
0:55:17 who writes these amazing Los Angeles police detective procedural novels, is great.
0:55:24 The Harry Bosch series, I think, John Le Carré’s spy stories, I mean, it’s a little bit more adult,
0:55:31 but he is an extraordinary pro stylist. There’s a great French detective writer, George Cimanon,
0:55:36 but it’s very short books and may great novels. But I also think nonfiction is fantastic.
0:55:42 There’s some great stuff for us recently about, well, I think that you’ve all know Harari’s
0:55:50 Sapiens is a great thing for a young adult to get into. There’s an American academic at Edinburgh
0:55:53 called Steve Bruce. He’s written a great book called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,
0:56:00 which I’d recommend. It’s a lovely book because he’s explaining some pretty complex stuff about
0:56:08 paleontology through stories of his friends in Poland and his adventures. So I’d be trying to
0:56:14 ship that at them. I think historical novels can also be a great way through.
0:56:19 I don’t know how young your youngest son is, maybe a little old now, but there’s a series
0:56:24 called the Young Samurai series set in Tokugawa, Japan for about 1600.
0:56:26 Do you see Shogun?
0:56:29 Yeah, exactly. It’s very much Shogun for children.
0:56:29 Wonderful.
0:56:31 I read Shogun when I was 15 and loved it.
0:56:37 Yeah, James Clavel. I remember that. I like all of those. Rory Stewart is the former UK
0:56:41 Secretary of State for International Development and co-host of the popular podcast The Rest is
0:56:47 Politics. He serves as a senior advisor to give directly a notable direct cash charity and his
0:56:52 professor in the practice of grand strategy at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
0:56:55 Rory is also the author of several books, including The Places in Between, How Not to
0:57:01 Be a Politician and Politics on the Edge. I could go on forever, but the thing I found so interesting
0:57:07 here is that he walked on foot for two years across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India,
0:57:15 and Nepal in 2002. Rory, I could not disagree with you more on Israel, but I find you are so
0:57:22 sober and thoughtful and reserved and intellectually honest about your comments,
0:57:27 that it softens the beach for me, and while I haven’t changed my view, I do learn.
0:57:32 And I hope that more people are exposed to you and your views, because even if they don’t change
0:57:37 their mind, it just helps us all move forward and think, all right, there’s got to be a way
0:57:41 we can find common ground here. Thank you for your good work. I really enjoyed this conversation.
0:57:43 Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate it.
0:58:01 Out of happiness, I was really moved by a TikTok I saw of a young woman who was talking,
0:58:07 she had left her house for the first time without a wig. She suffers from alopecia,
0:58:12 has some baldness, hair loss, whatever you want to call it. And she said it was the first time
0:58:17 she’d left her house without a wig, and it was a very trying and emotional moment for her,
0:58:22 and that she wasn’t going to let alopecia rule her life. And I really related to it in the sense
0:58:30 that I think as young people, we’re just so focused, we’re so insecure, we’re insecure beings,
0:58:35 and we’re insecure for a reason. You’re meant to be worried about shit, because that’s a survival
0:58:40 instinct. You’re meant to worry about what others think about you, because being shaming and kicked
0:58:46 out of the tribe meant certain death. So shame and also your attractiveness to mates wanting to be
0:58:53 attractive such that the species propagate. I think that men are especially susceptible to
0:59:00 shaming around their economic viability, and women are unfairly judged based on their aesthetics.
0:59:03 So I think there can be especially insecure around their looks, especially young people.
0:59:10 And it kind of took me back to when I lost my hair. Believe it or not, my hair used to be one
0:59:14 of my best features. I had a ponytail in graduate school, which is an image, isn’t it? And then
0:59:19 when I started losing my hair, it was just sort of devastating is the wrong word, but it was really
0:59:23 upsetting. And the worst thing about losing your hair is the losing part. It’s great to have a full
0:59:29 head of hair. It’s great, in my opinion, to be bald. I love having a shaved head. But the in-between
0:59:33 is what sucked. And it used to be a huge source of insecurity and upset for me that I was losing
0:59:37 what I thought was my best feature. And obviously it represents the loss of masculinity and youth and
0:59:43 all those good things. But what I would say to anyone who’s struggling with one thing about their
0:59:49 physical appearance, keep in mind that people just look at you and they make an assessment
0:59:55 on the whole you. And I was looking at this woman, she had really cool nails and beautiful skin and
1:00:01 a nice smile. And I remember thinking that people who look at her or men that look at her think,
1:00:05 oh, there’s a nice looking woman. And they might think, if they look closely, oh, she has hair loss,
1:00:10 but they don’t, it’s not that what they zero in on. They zero in on how the whole person,
1:00:15 your personality, your intellect, your character, your smile, your clothes, the way you dress.
1:00:20 So my advice to young people is to lean into your strengths. I started working out such that
1:00:28 I could take advantage of some of my strengths. And I tried to take some pride in the way I dress,
1:00:33 despite the fact that losing your hair in your 20s is not a very good look. I also had terrible
1:00:38 acne when I was younger. And I started getting scarring on my face, which I was really self-conscious
1:00:43 about. And then I remember telling my ex-wife that I was so self-conscious about my acne scars.
1:00:48 And she looked at me and she said, where do you have acne scars? And I thought, wow, people really
1:00:54 don’t notice what you think they’re noticing. And so what you’re going to be upset about when you get
1:01:02 older is not that you had acne, not that you had hair loss, not that you’re a little bit overweight,
1:01:07 whatever it might be, you’re going to be upset at how upset you were. Don’t focus on the little
1:01:11 things. Don’t focus on what’s wrong with you. The thing you’re going to be upset about is looking
1:01:15 back. You’re going to wish you’d been kinder to yourself. You’re going to realize that you were
1:01:22 better looking than you thought. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren. Jennifer Sanchez
1:01:27 is our associate producer. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening
1:01:31 to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No
1:01:37 Mercy, No Mouse, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod wherever you
1:01:40 get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
1:01:51 Whew. I got a zit coming out of my face. I’ve not a zit in a while.
1:02:02 Makes me feel 18 again, actually makes me feel 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 again. Oh my god.
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0:01:11 Will the VP debate move the needle in what’s shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election?
0:01:14 You never know in advance what will be the thing that matters
0:01:15 and the thing that doesn’t matter.
0:01:19 But Donald Trump will be almost 80,
0:01:25 and J.D. Vance will be one cheeseburger away from the presidency should they win.
0:01:30 I’m Preet Bharara, and this week, the Atlantic magazine’s David Frum
0:01:32 joins me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet,
0:01:35 to break down what happened at the debate.
0:01:36 The episode is out now.
0:01:40 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:46 Episode 319.
0:01:47 Through and under is Erica in covering parts of Iowa.
0:01:51 1919, the U.S. ratified the 18th Amendment,
0:01:55 leading to the prohibition of alcohol, three guys walking to a bar,
0:01:59 an alcoholic, a priest, and a child molester.
0:02:02 And that’s just the first guy.
0:02:04 Go! Go! Go!
0:02:16 Welcome to the 319th episode of The Prop G Pod.
0:02:18 In today’s episode, we speak with Rory Stewart,
0:02:21 the former UK Secretary of State for International Development,
0:02:24 and co-host of the popular podcast, The Rest is Politics.
0:02:28 We discussed with Rory Geopolitics, the state of politics in the U.S. and the UK,
0:02:31 and his recent TED talk where he advocates for a radical way
0:02:35 to address extreme poverty worldwide.
0:02:40 This guy just kind of bleeds, I don’t know, the Union Jack.
0:02:43 He just struck me as so British, but kind of the good parts of Britain.
0:02:46 He’s super smart, super polite,
0:02:49 and I really enjoyed the conversation.
0:02:53 I’m trying to get down, I’m trying to be a little bit more English.
0:02:55 I’m sitting here with tea.
0:02:58 Honey, that’s great tea, tea and biscuits.
0:03:02 Anyways, enjoy our conversation with Consummit Britt,
0:03:04 center of the universe, epicenter of intellect.
0:03:08 Okay, what’s happening? Let’s get to the news.
0:03:14 The dog is home in London after drinking beer and eating sausage in Munich.
0:03:18 And I went to the Activist meeting or conference,
0:03:20 whatever it is, a friend of mine, Steve Cericino, runs the fund,
0:03:23 and I committed to speaking there.
0:03:24 By the way, just a quick trick.
0:03:27 If you ever need someone to commit to something you’re worried about them committing to,
0:03:29 ask them like six months out.
0:03:31 I pretty much commit to anything if it’s six or nine months out,
0:03:33 because it doesn’t seem real to me.
0:03:36 I think there’s a lesson for young people there,
0:03:39 and that is the present value of your emotions is incredibly higher.
0:03:40 It’s discounted at a huge rate,
0:03:44 and that is when you go out about 10 years,
0:03:47 you’re going to look back on the shit that you were really upset about right now,
0:03:50 and you’ll be able to discount it back to the reality of the situation,
0:03:54 and it’s going to seem very small or put another way.
0:03:57 This too shall pass. Don’t be too upset about things.
0:03:58 I don’t know how I got there.
0:04:00 Anyways, what else is going on?
0:04:05 Some big news from my home state of California, Governor Newsom, so handsome, so handsome.
0:04:06 He should be president.
0:04:11 Just anyone that good looking who’s not a village idiot should be president.
0:04:13 I just think it helps to have tall, good-looking people.
0:04:14 I think people take him more seriously.
0:04:19 Anyways, he vetoed SB 1047, an AI safety bill,
0:04:24 aimed to regulate the computing power used to train large artificial intelligence models.
0:04:28 Hollywood and others, including Elon Musk and Jeffrey Hinton,
0:04:31 the godfather of AI, were all for this bill.
0:04:33 So why were they for it? Simple.
0:04:38 So Jeffrey Hinton is very smart, and I think he sees and is justifiably concerned
0:04:42 about the progress of AI and thinks there should be more oversight and regulation.
0:04:48 In addition, California has a habit of leading the nation and the world on thoughtful regulation.
0:04:52 Why do I think it was good for the governor to veto this bill?
0:04:58 Okay, as far as I can tell, this bill essentially was not a bill to regulate AI.
0:05:00 It was a bill to kneecap open AI.
0:05:04 Specifically, it was legislation meant to slow down one company in particular,
0:05:08 and that’s why, quite frankly, Elon Musk was in favor of Mr. Don’t Regulate,
0:05:12 Mr. Tech Libertarian, Get Out of the Way, We’re Smarter Than Government.
0:05:17 Like this, why? Because he’s got his own AI company that is fucking nowhere so far,
0:05:21 and he wants to slow down the leader such that he can catch up.
0:05:23 I just think it’s very disingenuous.
0:05:26 Let’s break down SB 1047, the recently vetoed bill.
0:05:31 This legislation wants to mandate safety testing of AI models that require a certain level of computing power
0:05:33 and cost about $100 million to train.
0:05:36 Okay, the first part of that, there’s nothing wrong with that.
0:05:38 The second part of it, nothing wrong with it.
0:05:42 The bill required companies to add a kill switch to shut down rogue systems
0:05:47 and gave the state the power to sue AI companies if their technology caused harm.
0:05:50 All right, a kill switch makes a lot of sense to me, right?
0:05:52 I’ve never bought that this is sent in.
0:05:55 I think there is always a kill switch, and if there isn’t, they’re lying to you
0:06:00 so they can throw up their arms and say, “No, we want to continue to take ads from Nissan,
0:06:02 and we can’t stop it. Bullshit.”
0:06:05 Notice how all of a sudden Instagram has figured out a way to agegate?
0:06:09 Supposedly it was too complex. They couldn’t figure it out.
0:06:13 And then on the eve of the Kids Online Safety Act, COSA, they figured it out.
0:06:17 It’s pretty easy. They use AI to say, “Okay, clearly, this is a 13-year-old.”
0:06:20 And then when they ask you to verify your age, and it sounds like you’re lying,
0:06:23 they ask you to upload a federal ID, and boom, they have agegated.
0:06:24 What do you know they figured it out?
0:06:28 Isn’t that impressive on the eve of legislation?
0:06:29 There’s a lot of problems with this.
0:06:35 First, the language. If AI companies, if their technology causes harm, okay.
0:06:37 What does that mean, girlfriend? What does that mean?
0:06:41 Like, that’s a pretty wide truck to run shit through.
0:06:43 And I’m definitely a fan of regulating these companies,
0:06:48 but that sounds like just all sorts of class action suits right out of the gates.
0:06:51 In addition, the other thing that was a bit of a tell here
0:06:55 was that they wanted this legislation or this new law to apply to companies
0:06:58 that train over $100 million to train their LLM.
0:07:02 This sounds to me like 98% of the venture capital community
0:07:07 that has funded startups that aren’t open AI
0:07:10 to say, “We want to catch up to open AI and chat to you.”
0:07:12 That is basically running away with it, and they are running away with it.
0:07:15 They have about 70% share of an emerging market.
0:07:18 What’s interesting is just as new technologies that resonate
0:07:20 have faster kind of zero to 60 adoption time,
0:07:23 meaning they get ubiquitous adoption across the general public.
0:07:25 It’s getting shorter and shorter.
0:07:29 It took 10 years for faxes to catch on, 15 years for VCRs to catch on.
0:07:33 It took about two or three years for social media for Instagram to catch on.
0:07:36 And it gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
0:07:40 AI kind of is zero to whatever it was, 10 million users was like,
0:07:42 I don’t know, six or nine months, something crazy.
0:07:46 But just as the emergence or the adoption of these technologies
0:07:47 is happening faster and faster,
0:07:51 so is the emergence of the ultimate duopolys and monopolies that emerge.
0:07:54 Because one company jumps out ahead, has more access to cheap capital,
0:07:57 weaponizes government, soaks up the best human capital,
0:07:59 and kind of runs away with it.
0:08:01 And I think we have a duopoly emerging right now.
0:08:06 And just as Wintel was a source of huge regulatory concern
0:08:10 and probably suppressed a lot of innovation in the ’80s and ’90s,
0:08:12 I think you’re seeing a similar duopoly emerge.
0:08:14 And I’m going to call it open video.
0:08:20 And that is open AI and NVIDIA essentially control 70 and 92%
0:08:25 of the AI market and the AI processor market, respectively.
0:08:26 They’re effectively running away with it.
0:08:29 And if you look at their market capitalizations,
0:08:33 I think they’re just going to have access to a certain level of financial and human capital
0:08:37 that’ll make it hard for them or hard for anyone else to emerge and compete.
0:08:39 There’ll be niche applications, there’ll be all sorts of deals.
0:08:42 The ecosystem itself is going to make a lot of money.
0:08:45 But these guys, in my view, are running away with it.
0:08:49 And so I believe in a progressive tax structure.
0:08:51 And that is, as companies get bigger and make more money,
0:08:52 they should pay more taxes.
0:08:57 By the way, fun fact, corporations are paying their lowest tax rate since 1939
0:09:01 as a percentage of GDP, or is it just basically their tax rates?
0:09:03 Anyways, they’re not paying a lot of taxes right now.
0:09:05 So I think there should be a progressive tax structure.
0:09:09 You should make more money, your marginal tax rate should go up.
0:09:11 But I don’t believe in progressive legislation.
0:09:12 I don’t like selective legislation
0:09:16 that basically harms a certain sector within a sector and not the others.
0:09:17 I think that’s bullshit.
0:09:21 And this to me feels like that we’d like to catch up legislation.
0:09:22 So I’m glad he vetoed it.
0:09:24 He also probably had a lot of political pressure on him.
0:09:27 I did a little bit of back of the envelope math, which I like to do.
0:09:31 Let’s talk about the state budget for California.
0:09:35 The state budget, which is effectively kind of the fifth biggest nation in the world,
0:09:37 is somewhere around a quarter of a trillion dollars.
0:09:39 So what does that mean?
0:09:46 It means that 10%, 10% of California’s budget is or comes from,
0:09:53 I should say 10% of the revenues, comes from the wealth created by two companies in AI,
0:09:54 comes from the AI duopoly.
0:09:58 So you can bet the governor Newsom wakes up in the middle of the night sweating
0:10:01 and his wife turns over and says, “Gov, what’s the problem?”
0:10:03 He said, “I just had this nightmare.”
0:10:05 And she says, “All right, what’s the nightmare?”
0:10:08 And he says, “Well, I had this nightmare that Jensen Huang called me and said,
0:10:13 “I’m going to go be Elon Musk’s roommate in Austin,” or wherever the fuck is in Texas,
0:10:18 because if these companies leave California, you’re talking about a budget hole being blown
0:10:23 the size of a very big hole in the California budget.
0:10:28 The governor noted that 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies are located in the great
0:10:29 state of California.
0:10:30 Can you believe that?
0:10:35 California has a 64% share of AI companies, and I bet by market capitalization,
0:10:39 it’s 80 or 90%, maybe not that much, because Microsoft’s in Seattle.
0:10:39 I don’t know.
0:10:40 I need to think that through.
0:10:42 I need to think that through.
0:10:46 According to the legislative analyst’s office in 2023, just four major tech companies,
0:10:52 Apple, Google, Metta, and NVIDIA accounted for more than 6% of the state’s total income tax
0:10:53 revenue.
0:10:53 I don’t know what is it.
0:10:54 Cap gains.
0:10:55 I just did that math.
0:11:02 Anyways, this is, in my opinion, incredibly important that we think about getting this
0:11:08 right and trying to balance growth and tax revenue and innovation and jobs with some
0:11:14 sense or some recognition or nod to the fact that not regulating social media and technology
0:11:17 has turned basically an entire generation into addicts.
0:11:18 What do I mean by that?
0:11:22 Just as they’re going through puberty and their brain is getting wired, we are teaching
0:11:24 them to constantly need dopa.
0:11:30 Once they get to a certain age, they’re going to find means of that constant dopa hit through
0:11:32 other means that’ll be pretty unhealthy.
0:11:37 I think you’re going to see addiction, absolutely skyrocket, and it’s going to be reverse engineered
0:11:43 to who are the drug dealers sitting outside of junior high school selling snacks, specifically
0:11:48 Satchinadella, specifically Cinderpichai, and Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg.
0:11:49 Yeah, I said it.
0:11:51 Tim Cook sitting outside of junior high school selling fucking smack.
0:11:53 That is what’s going on here.
0:11:55 These companies need to agegate their devices.
0:12:00 There’s no reason a 16-year-old should have a smartphone or much less be on social
0:12:00 media.
0:12:05 Moving on, California is also in the news for banning legacy and donor admissions at private
0:12:08 universities, including Stanford University, USC, and others.
0:12:11 This ban will take effect in the fall of 2025.
0:12:12 What are legacy admissions?
0:12:15 It’s a practice where certain applicants are given special consideration
0:12:18 because of family or other connections to the school.
0:12:22 Public universities, including the University of California and California State Universities,
0:12:24 have long banned legacy admissions.
0:12:27 So as usual, UC is way out in front of everybody.
0:12:31 By the way, the University of California did away with race-based affirmative action in 1997,
0:12:37 26 years ago, 27 years ago, and went to an adversity score saying, “All right,
0:12:40 if you’re the daughter of an Indian private equity billionaire, you don’t need any help.
0:12:45 But if you’re a white kid from Appalachia from a single parent family and your
0:12:48 mom’s incarcerated, maybe we take that into account.”
0:12:52 And that is absolutely the right way to implement affirmative action.
0:12:54 I’m a beneficiary of affirmative action.
0:12:55 I got Pell Grants.
0:12:56 My mother was a secretary.
0:12:58 She never made more than $40,000 a year.
0:13:03 And that financial aid, that unfair advantage, that discrimination in my favor,
0:13:07 paid off for everybody, which takes me back to legacy admissions.
0:13:09 Legacy admissions actually do have an upside.
0:13:14 And that is they create more affinity, more affection, and greater donors for that school.
0:13:18 And I believe, if you were to say, “Okay, on legacy admissions, we’ll give your kid a leg up.”
0:13:22 But, but we’re going to charge him or her more.
0:13:23 I think you just go straight capitalist here.
0:13:26 The problem, remember Varsity Blues where all those people got stuck in jail,
0:13:31 where Aunt Becky got stuck in jail for paying someone half a million bucks to get her kids
0:13:33 in to pretend that she was a rower?
0:13:34 By the way, I did it entirely wrong.
0:13:36 I went to UCLA and then started rowing.
0:13:37 That made no sense.
0:13:40 Anyways, my attitude is let’s go full capitalist.
0:13:43 These universities, my friends, we’re whores.
0:13:44 Let’s be clear.
0:13:47 But we’re expensive whores that like to think that we’re not whores.
0:13:48 What do I mean by that?
0:13:53 Aunt Becky didn’t go to jail for giving a half a million dollars to get her kid into school.
0:13:56 She went to jail for not giving five million.
0:13:59 In other words, if Aunt Becky had called and said, “Hi, USC.
0:14:01 I’ll give you not even five million.
0:14:02 I’ll give you two million dollars.”
0:14:05 They put Becky’s name.
0:14:08 They’d be like growing pains or whatever the fuck that show was called on the side of a building.
0:14:11 The growing pain center for media and her kid would have got in.
0:14:16 But because she cheaped out and paid someone outside the university half a million dollars,
0:14:20 they called the FBI and the FBI got involved in trying to send a message to a lot of rich
0:14:21 people that this is not cool.
0:14:25 And I get why people think this is wrong.
0:14:26 I get it.
0:14:26 I get it.
0:14:28 But be clear, folks.
0:14:30 We’re still letting in the children of rich people.
0:14:31 They got tutors.
0:14:34 They have access to the industrial tutoring complex.
0:14:35 They have friends on the board.
0:14:36 They get the better recs.
0:14:37 So what do we do?
0:14:39 We take some of that money.
0:14:39 Sure, charge them more.
0:14:41 Your legacy, fine.
0:14:43 We need you to give money and we need you to pay more.
0:14:49 And then we’re going to use that money to offer more seats such that we can let in more kids.
0:14:56 If you had a pill, then when someone took it, made them less likely to be depressed,
0:15:00 less likely to kill themselves, less likely to kill other people, more likely to run for
0:15:04 president, more likely to vote, more likely to get married, more likely to pay a shit ton
0:15:08 of taxes, more likely to be millionaires, less likely to be obese, less likely to be
0:15:11 diabetic, less likely to be incarcerated.
0:15:15 Would you say, I’m not going to give that pill to 91% of the people who want it?
0:15:17 That’s what UCLA does.
0:15:23 Higher ed is the pill, is the treatment, is the ointment, is the pharmaceutical that makes
0:15:24 people’s lives better.
0:15:27 Case in point, the guy on this fucking podcast.
0:15:29 Why are we hoarding it?
0:15:36 So I can feel good about myself and the dean of NYU Stern stands up and says we rejected 85%
0:15:37 of our applicants.
0:15:42 That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging that he or she turned away
0:15:44 nine in people that showed up last night.
0:15:48 We are, we are public servants, not fucking Chanel bags.
0:15:52 We’ll be right back for our conversation with Rory Stewart.
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0:19:18 Welcome back.
0:19:22 Here’s our conversation with Rory Stewart, the former U.K. Secretary of State for
0:19:26 International Development and co-host of the popular podcast, The Rest Is Politics.
0:19:28 Rory, what does this podcast find you?
0:19:30 I have just got to London.
0:19:35 So, in your recently released head talk, you advocate for a radical way to address extreme
0:19:38 poverty worldwide, giving cash directly to people in poverty.
0:19:43 Give us that pitch for why we should just be giving people in poverty just straight up cash.
0:19:47 Just before we get into the nub of it, I think the important thing is to understand that there
0:19:51 are basically two models in the world, and it’s caught up in this phrase,
0:19:56 teach someone to fish they can eat for lifetime, give them a fish they eat for a day.
0:20:01 And a lot of the fashion in international development, for very understandable reasons,
0:20:06 has been not about giving people things, but instead about giving them training,
0:20:07 knowledge, capacity building.
0:20:16 And cash is very radical because it’s an action of radical humility or essentially saying,
0:20:19 these people have a better idea about their lives and priorities than I do,
0:20:24 and I’m going to get out of the way and give them what they really want, which is cash.
0:20:28 Now, why does it work? And this, we can get into the evidence on it.
0:20:32 The evidence is very striking, hundreds of randomized control trials demonstrating the
0:20:38 impact. My guess for why it works is that firstly, it’s much more flexible.
0:20:44 I think the second thing that it does quite powerfully is it’s generally much more efficient.
0:20:49 I mean, if I give you the cash to fix your own roof in a very poor community,
0:20:53 you can probably get it done for about $150. If I bring in a non-profit,
0:20:58 we’d have to bring in engineers, we’d survey your house, we’d procure your roof,
0:21:01 we’d do all these studies, and we’d end up spending many thousands of dollars,
0:21:04 almost certainly for similar impact.
0:21:11 And then I guess somewhere at the bottom of it is the sense that in many cases,
0:21:16 people already have the knowledge. They already know what business they want to run.
0:21:18 They just lack the capital to get that business off the ground.
0:21:23 So those three things together, I think, are the ingredients that makes cash so effective.
0:21:29 Your comments, I mean, I think true insight is when you state the obvious, but you weren’t,
0:21:32 it wasn’t obvious to you before you heard it. And your comments really resonate because I
0:21:40 equated a little bit to, there’s a DEI apparatus that’s propped up or popped up across every
0:21:46 university in America. And I would argue that it was, these apparatus were apparatus, whatever
0:21:51 its term is, were desperately needed. 60 years ago, 12 black people at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
0:21:54 That was an issue. We needed departments to focus on the issue.
0:21:59 Now they have huge apparatus of very well-paid people, a lot of resources.
0:22:04 Harvard’s freshman class is 51% non-white. But these apparatus never go away.
0:22:10 And the way I relate it back to this is all of these non-profits represent a lot of jobs and
0:22:14 a lot of people who make good livings and feel important and feel like they’re doing good work
0:22:19 and have a vested interest in, quite frankly, obstructing a simpler
0:22:25 solution is devising it or positioning it as crass or is not that effective. And
0:22:30 do you see what I’ll call the non-profit infrastructure sort of getting in the way
0:22:34 and being intellectually dishonest about how effective this would be?
0:22:43 Yes. And I was part of that. I mean, I was the UK Secretary of State, so I was the minister
0:22:48 in charge of this $20 billion a year budget and thousands of civil servants doing international
0:22:55 development. And I remember when people first brought this idea of cash to me that I said half
0:23:00 joking, listen, what’s going to happen to all of us, right? There are thousands of us employed,
0:23:04 managing, we’ve all done master’s degrees in agricultural economics. We’re going to be experts
0:23:09 on health programs and remote parts of Liberia. If we’re just giving people cash, what about all
0:23:15 us, right? I realize that it’s a sort of strange thing when you’re inside a bureaucracy. I’m only
0:23:21 half joking. And the fact that that’s my immediate reaction suggests something quite strange about
0:23:27 the way that the mind of the bureaucrat works. So the majority of our listeners are in the U.S.
0:23:32 and for those of you who don’t know, Rory is the co-host of what is probably, I would argue,
0:23:36 the best politics podcast in the world right now called The Rest is Politics. I’m going to ask you
0:23:40 to do something that is nearly impossible, but if you were to give Americans who have
0:23:47 little or no sense of U.K. politics over the last 10 years, can you give us the cliff notes
0:23:52 on what has happened in the U.K. and what you think it represents and what have been the major
0:23:58 sort of shifts around leadership and what the populace has decided and where you think the U.K.
0:24:08 is headed politically, if you will. So I think the first really big date is 2005, when 2005 the
0:24:14 British economy is still bigger than the Chinese economy, not very long ago. That’s crazy. That’s
0:24:20 a great start. It’s amazing. 19 years ago, the U.K. had a bigger economy in China. Yeah. And now the
0:24:26 Chinese economy is about seven times as. So that’s the first big fact. Our relative power in the
0:24:31 world has changed very dramatically. And it’s concealed from us because we’ve gone from being
0:24:35 the fourth largest economy in the world to being the fifth largest economy in the world. But in
0:24:42 relative terms, the shift has been off the scale. Second date, I think is 2010, when a conservative
0:24:47 government was elected, which has been in for the last 14 years and was only finally kicked out by a
0:24:53 more left-wing labor government that came in just in an election just under 100 days ago. And they
0:25:00 came in off the financial crisis, and their watchword was austerity. So they tried to reduce the
0:25:07 debt and deficit. They cut government spending very dramatically. And there’s, as you can imagine,
0:25:12 a huge argument between conservatives and people on the other side about whether that was the right
0:25:19 thing to do for the economy or not. Next date, 2016, Britain votes to leave the European Union.
0:25:26 And that removes us from being part of a single marketer customs union with our
0:25:34 largest trading partner. Next date, I guess, that matters is 2020, when we get into one of the most
0:25:40 aggressive COVID lockdowns in the world, far more so than the US. I mean, people were kind
0:25:44 of shopping their neighbors for gathering in groups and more than three at a barbecue outdoors.
0:25:51 And we’re still calculating the cost of that, but it probably costs the British government
0:25:57 about £400 million, which is a significant, sorry, £400 billion. I’m sorry, I got a thousand,
0:26:04 a thousand off that £400 billion. So a really significant chunk of government expenditure
0:26:09 annually is about a trillion. So about 40% of annual government expenditure was spent on the COVID
0:26:18 response. And then the final thing has been demography. So when we set up our welfare state
0:26:22 before the First World War, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today, there
0:26:28 are just under three working people for every one retired person. We’re living longer and longer.
0:26:33 We have a cradle to grave healthcare system that’s getting more and more expensive. In fact,
0:26:39 about 3% more expensive every year than inflation because of aging and the cost of drugs.
0:26:45 And our economic growth has been anemic. Our productivity has been flat since the financial
0:26:52 crisis. And you can imagine as a result of all of that, you have a pretty cross population
0:26:56 and a new government that’s come in feeling it doesn’t have many options because unlike the US,
0:26:59 it’s not the world’s reserve currency. It can’t go and borrow a huge amount.
0:27:05 Describe what you think will be the biggest changes of this new administration relative to the
0:27:10 conservatives over the last 14 years. Well, it’s very difficult to see that at the moment.
0:27:17 I mean, it’s very cosmetic. They’re closer to the unions and they’ve given significant public
0:27:21 sector pay rises as soon as they came in, which of course has made the conservatives
0:27:26 sort of delighted because it plays into their kind of cliches about left-wing governments.
0:27:32 They have however stuck with most of the spending reductions. They’ve promised not to increase
0:27:37 taxes. They’ve promised not to increase borrowing. How do they do that? If they’re going to increase
0:27:42 wages, how do they not increase the deficit of taxes? They’ve cut investment and that again
0:27:46 is pretty troubling. I mean, they’ve stopped most of the rail and road investment. They’ve just
0:27:50 canceled a big supercomputer that was being built in Edinburgh. They’ve announced they’re not going
0:27:56 ahead with big programs to rebuild hospitals. So I think they’re in trouble. I mean, this is a
0:28:02 left-wing government that’s come in after 14 years in which the British public are fed up with
0:28:07 austerity and want more investment in public services. It’s a government that is trying to
0:28:11 reassure the financial markets and felt that the only way of winning the election was to promise
0:28:16 it would never put taxes up, but now finds itself having won a big majority with its hands tied
0:28:23 behind its back by this promise. So what I’d like to do is I want to give you some observations
0:28:29 of a bystander and that as an American who’s lived in London for two years and as a means of
0:28:34 contrasting or using it as a jumping out point for contrasting the US and the little I understand
0:28:39 about the UK, but I’ll give you some observations and I want you to respond to them. The first is
0:28:43 to the upside. As an American here, as someone who’s concerned themselves are progressive,
0:28:49 I find all the dumb arguments in the UK have been put in the past. Assault weapons, well,
0:28:53 of course we don’t have assault weapons, bodily autonomy for women. Well, it’s not even a
0:28:59 conversation or of course women in bodily autonomy. Trans rights, okay, fine. It’s not a big issue
0:29:02 for us. We’re not going to spend a ton of political capital worrying about a second or a third
0:29:09 bathroom. So I really appreciate that about the UK. My observation is that, and this is a question,
0:29:14 I’m genuinely flummoxed by the amount of intellectual property here, the amount of
0:29:20 intellectual capital, the unbelievable quality of the education system. The thing I love most
0:29:24 about the UK is my kids’ schools. I just think they’re fantastic. And I think the universities
0:29:29 here are incredible. I’ve had the good privilege or the good fortune to speak at a bunch of them,
0:29:37 just such incredibly bright people. An amazing culture, a rule of fair play, smart, funny,
0:29:44 and appreciation for the arts, a global culture that appreciates other cultures. And yet they
0:29:51 can’t get out of their own goddamn way. And when I look at London, I think there’s no organic value
0:29:58 creation. The only people I know making money here are serving money made elsewhere. Do you agree
0:30:05 with this? That Britain, the UK still has all the pillars to be just a robust high growth
0:30:13 leadership economy and manages to steal victory from the jaws of defeat. I don’t know why
0:30:19 your thoughts. It’s obviously the central question of British politics. And there’s a lot
0:30:29 of different ideology goes into trying to answer that question. Some of it is cultural. So we have
0:30:35 a big problem with developing technology and ideas and then struggling to finance it. And that seems
0:30:42 to be partly about the risk capital in the UK. I think another thing is that we have really
0:30:49 struggled to unlock the potential of anything outside London and the Southeast. We’ve created a
0:30:53 very unequal economy and some of that is about infrastructure investment. If we had decent
0:30:59 rail and road infrastructure connecting Leeds and Manchester, we would create pretty impressive
0:31:04 urban conurbation and we might be able to generate some serious productivity. Productivity in London
0:31:09 and the Southeast is so far ahead of the rest of the country. And then we get into ideology. I think
0:31:18 we’re too centralized. We should decentralize more. I think we’ve got really in our way when it
0:31:23 comes to planning and building things. I mean, one kilometer a road, one mile a road costs twice
0:31:29 as much to build as what it does in France. We’re struggling to build housing and a lot of that is
0:31:36 because we have this very, very consensual planning system where people discuss everything for years
0:31:43 and every newt and argument good and bad for why houses shouldn’t be built ahead and very little
0:31:50 gets off the ground. So now do the US. You’re a very thoughtful guy. Give us your no mercy,
0:31:57 no malice view of the situation in America. I’m married to an American. I have been teaching at
0:32:05 Yale. So what does the European notice looking at the US? I think one thing is you have a really
0:32:10 magical economy. I mean, there’s something astonishing about what’s happened in the
0:32:15 last 14 years in terms of the divergence from the eurozone. We were almost level pegging in GDP
0:32:24 per capita 14, 15 years ago and US growth rates have shot off. And you’re doing it in a way that
0:32:30 doesn’t really make sense to us. If I was being rude about the US, your state education system
0:32:35 is terrible. I mean, I’ve just been in Chicago. The statistics from Cook County are beyond
0:32:40 belief. The majority of people graduating high school who should not be in any position to
0:32:45 graduate high school in terms of their literacy and numeracy rates. And theoretically, when we
0:32:50 model these things, smart people like you tell us that the way to create productivity is to have a
0:32:56 great education system and all these people coming through. But my goodness, apart from the top,
0:33:01 apart from the kind of the cream of America, these incredible Ivy League universities,
0:33:08 the mass of people are not receiving good education. And you know, God, we’re also completely puzzled
0:33:14 by healthcare and welfare. We’re very puzzled by the fact that it just seems so rich, but also so
0:33:19 poor. I mean, go up and down the Connecticut shoreline, there are just boats everywhere.
0:33:24 I mean, you have tens of millions of people who are astonishingly wealthy, and then
0:33:29 you have people living in Flint, Michigan or in Georgia in conditions that we couldn’t imagine
0:33:33 in Europe. So those are the kinds of things that puzzle us. And I think one of the things
0:33:40 that puzzles us most probably is that an election in Europe, in the UK or Europe, would be talking
0:33:47 about the state education system. It would be talking about public health and health delivery.
0:33:54 That doesn’t seem to be what’s dominating the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
0:33:59 at all. Do you have kids, Rory? Yeah, I’ve got two boys. Two boys, how old? Nine and seven.
0:34:05 You’re in the golden decade, four to 14 are wonderful. Zero to four, we pretend to like it,
0:34:10 we don’t. Once they turn 14, they stop, you know, they no longer look up to you, you become just
0:34:16 this awful person that just warrants eye rolls about 12 times a day. You’re in the golden decade.
0:34:29 My question is where, if they said dad aged 18 to 38, kind of the years starting my career,
0:34:32 getting going, would you want them to live in the US or the UK and why?
0:34:38 At the moment, I’d probably be tempted by them living in the US, I’m afraid. And it’s a terrible
0:34:43 thing to say because I’ve dedicated my whole life to Britain. I was a British politician. I
0:34:50 love this country. I have huge emotional investment in it. But it feels to me as though we are really
0:34:59 lost at the moment. And that’s an awful thing to say. But I’m afraid I understand why so many
0:35:03 people around the world want their children to move to the US. I mean, it just feels as though
0:35:08 there’s more space to come back to the old cliche that there’s more opportunity.
0:35:16 But I hope I’m proved wrong. I hope we can find our way through this malaise and that over the
0:35:22 next decade, we can get the UK back into a situation where I can say this is where our ancestors
0:35:27 are buried. This is where my house is. This is where our roots are and let’s make a go of it.
0:35:32 You described democracy as increasingly fragile. What do you believe are the key
0:35:38 threats to democracy today? I think the first fundamental threat is that liberal democracies
0:35:45 haven’t been delivering well enough for people. I mean, that for about 200 years from the early
0:35:51 1800s, we could tell a story where we convinced ourselves that democracies were naturally more
0:35:57 prosperous. And as people became more prosperous, they became more democratic. And partly because of
0:36:03 the rise of China, but partly because the success of other authoritarian regimes, we’ve broken the
0:36:09 link in which democracies are not necessarily delivering for people. And in certain years,
0:36:13 it feels as though non-democratic states are delivering quite effectively. So that’s one problem.
0:36:19 I think the second, and that is a big problem because I think the reason why people buy into
0:36:24 democracy is not only because they believe in human rights and liberal values, it’s also because
0:36:32 it was making them wealthier. I think the second threat is I’m afraid social media. I think it’s
0:36:38 not a coincidence that the rise of social media from 2003, 2004 onwards and its explosion with
0:36:44 the Arab Spring in 2010, 2011 is part of the story of the rise of populism and the rise of
0:36:51 authoritarianism because I think those are algorithms that drive people into polarized states. And I
0:36:58 think they have been extremely bad for the key bits of democratic discourse in particular,
0:37:03 compromise, meeting in the middle, explaining, having a shared frame of reference.
0:37:09 What in your view is the impact on the UK and Europe of a Trump or a Harris presidency?
0:37:16 Harris presidency, I think, doesn’t trouble people too much. It feels like a continuity
0:37:21 of what went before Biden. And we feel we sort of got a measure of where Joe Biden was coming from.
0:37:28 Trump presidency, I think, is going to be more troubling for people because it will encourage
0:37:36 populists like Viktor Orban in Hungary or Marine Le Pen, who’s this far-right politician running to
0:37:41 be the president of France to feel that they’re entering a new age of strong men or strong women.
0:37:48 We would be worried that he would pretty quickly compromise with Putin in a way that would
0:37:54 effectively give Putin power over Kiev. We would be concerned that
0:38:00 understandable American tendencies towards isolationism and protectionism would accelerate.
0:38:08 And we’d find ourselves facing significant trade barriers and that the world, as a result,
0:38:13 would get less stable and less prosperous. We’ll be right back.
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0:39:29 So you brought up some geopolitics. I apologize for skipping around so much here,
0:39:32 but while you’re here, I want to take advantage of this. I’d love to just get your quick thoughts
0:39:42 on the war in Britain’s role or non-role in the Ukraine-Russia war. Ukraine-Russia
0:39:52 has flipped on its head in three very dramatic ways. Initially, nobody expected Russia to go
0:39:57 into Ukraine, and they thought Russia was going to definitely take Kiev. Then they got optimistic
0:40:02 about a counteroffensive, and now we’re in a situation where the Russian economy is growing
0:40:06 fast. They seem to be able to mobilize a lot of people, and they seem to have a lot of missiles.
0:40:16 Ukraine’s survival is dependent on the UK, Europe, but above all the US, putting in tens of
0:40:22 billions of dollars a year, and being prepared to do that again next year. It’s also dependent
0:40:28 on our willingness to take risk in terms of allowing Ukraine to use weapons against Russian
0:40:34 territory and making the very difficult calculation of how Putin’s going to respond to that,
0:40:38 right the way through to whether he’s going to launch tactical nuclear weapons as part of a
0:40:51 response that. So I think we were right to fight. I think had we allowed Putin to simply walk into
0:40:56 Ukraine, a world that was already getting more and more dangerous would get significantly more
0:41:02 dangerous. In fact, I think the failure to respond in 2014 in Crimea, the failure to hold out red
0:41:08 lines in Syria as part of the reason we’re in this trouble. But equally, it’s obvious to all of us
0:41:15 that there needs to be a peace deal, that it’s not credible that Ukraine is going to be able to
0:41:20 achieve all the objectives that its supporters have, and I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine,
0:41:25 but that there needs to be some kind of negotiation. The only hope is that they can
0:41:29 do that negotiation from positional strength and momentum rather than from positional weakness.
0:41:31 The war on the Middle East?
0:41:39 War on the Middle East. Well, I think that too much of what Israel is doing is driven by Netanyahu’s
0:41:47 attempt to hold his coalition together and in particular hold Smotrych and Ben Kavir on the
0:41:54 far right of his coalition on side rather than actual calculation about what is likely to lead
0:41:59 to a more peaceful, stable situation for Israel. What would that be? Let me just press pause there.
0:42:05 What if you felt there was a more thoughtful administration? What do you think, what does
0:42:12 that look like? Well, it has to move very, very quickly towards reconstructing Gaza,
0:42:19 and it has to move very quickly towards some sort of path for political autonomy for Palestine.
0:42:26 It has to balance that with Israel’s security. Now, that’s not easy to do, but we had recipes
0:42:32 for what that might look like in the mid-1990s. We still had those recipes in the mid-2000s and
0:42:42 killing 40,000 people in Gaza and levelling that place. I mean, it’s destroyed and now
0:42:48 launching these attacks into Lebanon don’t seem to me to be part of a long-term plan.
0:42:52 I don’t see where that goes in five or 10 years’ time. I don’t see how that
0:43:01 gets anybody to a situation of stability. I’m afraid with the critics of Netanyahu on this,
0:43:07 I don’t think his objectives, his strategic objectives are achievable. I don’t think he can
0:43:13 eliminate Hamas. I definitely don’t think he can eliminate Hezbollah. If he can’t,
0:43:19 he needs to find a path towards coexistence, however difficult that is.
0:43:28 So just to play a kind of steel man this, so with respect to launching this offensive,
0:43:33 I forget the words used against Lebanon, what would you say to people who say, “Well,
0:43:37 Lebanon has fired 8,500 missiles into Israel over the last 10 years. This war has been going on a
0:43:43 while and that the only way to have some sort of stable peace is to quite frankly terrorize the
0:43:47 terrorists and have a preemptive strike.” Because it’s not as if, I mean, I’m thinking about the
0:43:52 pager detonations, it’s not as if these folks were trying, hoping to give peace a chance and seem
0:43:58 to be really open and biased towards a peace deal. I feel like it’s a very American thing that,
0:44:04 okay, we need peace, we need a ceasefire, versus recognizing throughout history the only way you
0:44:10 kind of get, in my opinion, a stable peace through a war is to win it. And that a lot of what Israel
0:44:16 is doing right now is, in my view, I think Netanyahu’s been diabolical in a disaster for Israel.
0:44:27 But at the same time, I think the response in Gaza has been fully warranted and that the collateral
0:44:36 damage there is horrific, but is on a civilian to combatant ratio more humane or less inhumane
0:44:43 than any recent war that the West has prosecuted. And it strikes me that when the media says that
0:44:49 Israel has escalated the war in Lebanon, I see them as trying to de-escalate future conflict by
0:44:56 going after an incredibly precise anti-terrorist operation, in my view, trying to preempt a
0:44:59 future war that threatens their very existence. Your thoughts?
0:45:07 Well, that’s definitely the view of the people who back it. I just don’t think it works. I don’t
0:45:15 understand how they think this is going to deal with 20,000 armed and highly experienced
0:45:23 Hezbollah veterans who have formed up over 40 years, who fought in Syria, who have 10 times the
0:45:29 number of weapons they had in 2004, including precision-guided munitions, short of a ground
0:45:36 assault into Lebanon, they’re never going to be able to tackle that. And I think a ground assault
0:45:42 into Lebanon is beyond them. I think it’s beyond Israeli capacity, because Hezbollah is a much
0:45:49 more formidable enemy than Hamas and their positions in Lebanon are incomparably more
0:45:57 difficult to attack. So they can blow up pages and they can destroy some missiles. But
0:46:09 the idea that that is going to win a victory, in a way, the logic of your argument would require
0:46:16 them to win a victory so decisive that there’s no coming back. But they can’t do that. They don’t have
0:46:21 those resources. They don’t have the manpower to do that. They don’t have an option of wiping
0:46:24 Hezbollah off the face of the map.
0:46:29 But let’s talk about what are the options to just sit and take it and hope that the
0:46:35 Americans of the West come in with some sort of diplomacy. I agree this is a much more
0:46:40 formidable fighting force. I guess what are the options here?
0:46:47 The options from the very beginning of the State of Israel have been very difficult. This
0:46:55 is a situation in which Israel was created out of conflict and war and has existed through
0:47:04 conflicts and war ever since. That has been the situation since the 1930s. And I guess,
0:47:09 do I think that there is a military end to that? No.
0:47:18 No. I think the situation was best in the mid 1990s when they were getting towards an
0:47:23 accommodation and when they were trying to be serious about what a two-state solution would be.
0:47:29 But I think this path of backing the settlers, backing people and the…
0:47:38 I mean, remember, Smotrych and Ben Gavir don’t want the existing boundaries of Israel.
0:47:41 They don’t even want the existing boundaries of Israel plus the settlements.
0:47:49 They have a vision of a historic Israel from the Bible which involves displacing and occupying
0:47:56 much, much more territory. So there’s no path there.
0:48:02 I feel like it’s unfair to say that without acknowledging that they’re surrounded by people
0:48:05 whose only constitutional amendment is the extermination of Jews.
0:48:11 So it’s one thing to have… I think there’s some outright, far-right bigots on the Knesset.
0:48:16 I think it’s been a disaster for Israel. Oversettlements. 100% I’m with you.
0:48:21 But meanwhile, the only thing I can see resembling a constitution or a mission or a purpose statement
0:48:27 about the Houthis and Hamas is the elimination of Israel and the extermination of Jews.
0:48:35 So that to me, one is awful practices on the part of a government or society.
0:48:41 Another is a genocidal death cult. And it strikes me that this piece we’re talking about that we’d
0:48:47 like, it takes two to tango. My sense is that Israel and the West have come to the table with
0:48:51 some semblance of an offer that Hamas has said they’re not interested in.
0:49:00 Well, there’s many things to unpack there. One is Netanyahu who’s not been serious about any offer.
0:49:06 He has no interest in these peace deals. The more fundamental thing, this is a horrible
0:49:09 thing to talk about, and it’s very difficult to talk about sensitively.
0:49:19 But I guess the question is, what is it exactly that Israel is worried about that they’re trying
0:49:25 to deal with here? There was an extreme barbaric horrifying atrocity in October.
0:49:33 But what actually happened there? What actually happened there was a pretty low tech assault
0:49:39 across a very poorly defended border with the Israeli army and security intelligence services,
0:49:45 I’m afraid, not competently defending that border. If you’re trying to fix that problem,
0:49:50 there is a hell of a lot that you could have done to prevent that assault happening.
0:49:58 And for the last 30 years, there’s been no evidence that Hamas and Hisbollah
0:50:04 posed an existential threat to the survival of Israel, nor what happened horrifying though it was,
0:50:11 was not an existential threat to the survival of Israel. What happened was a brutal horrifying
0:50:16 terrorist assault with all that went with it. And that’s something that could have been dealt with
0:50:21 I’m afraid, by reasonable military security intelligence procedures at a border.
0:50:28 This is also where I disagree with the US’s approach to 9/11. I don’t think 9/11 was an
0:50:34 existential threat to the United States. And I think the way to deal with it is to improve your
0:50:41 intelligence security procedures, not to think that you can somehow solve the problem once and
0:50:46 for all by invading someone else’s country. So you are being intellectually honest. I would
0:50:50 argue that you’re sort of blaming the victim and the second worst day in Jewish history since
0:50:57 the Holocaust does warrant a response. And to your point, when 2800 Americans were killed,
0:51:03 we went on to kill 400,000 Iraqis and Afghanis. And I would argue that in some ways that conflict
0:51:08 set the stage for what’s going on now. And that is an unchecked Iran, because we’ve taken out the
0:51:14 buffer of Iraq. So I agree with you to have the viewpoint you have on Israel would need to require
0:51:20 a similar response on what you feel is probably an over-response from the US.
0:51:24 A crazy response after 9/11. It made no response. I mean, the problem is,
0:51:31 this is too emotionally charged for people on every side. I mean, people have lost relatives,
0:51:35 they’ve seen images of rape and murder and there are hostages being kept.
0:51:42 So nobody’s going to want to think about this in objective terms. Nobody wants to think about
0:51:47 the long term. Nobody, people want revenge. And they want to believe the fantasy that there is
0:51:51 something that you can do that can guarantee this can never happen again. But the world
0:51:57 isn’t like that. And that region isn’t like that. And the same will be true on the Palestinian side.
0:52:04 What they see is 40,000 people killed and women and children dead. And they’re not interested
0:52:08 in having any conversation around this either, because everybody is too traumatized.
0:52:16 I want to move to something lighter. I don’t want to end on that. So I don’t know how to segue
0:52:21 out of this. I’m going to ask you two very, very trivial questions. The first is we’re going back
0:52:25 to our sons. We have a lot of young men who listen to this podcast, a lot of new dads.
0:52:32 What are your observations around parenting being a good partner and being a good father?
0:52:39 I think it’s very easy to say that you acknowledge that your children
0:52:45 are different to you. But in practice, it’s very difficult to lift that out. I mean, the great
0:52:51 wisdom is that these are very different human beings with very different characters and minds,
0:52:59 and they’re going to find their own paths. But there is so much in our parenting, which is about
0:53:04 trying to model the parenting that we received or repeat the parenting we received or
0:53:11 to try to make kids do things which we enjoyed or read books which we like reading or become the
0:53:16 kind of people that we either were or even worse trying to become the kind of people we wished
0:53:24 we were. So getting out of their way and getting the balance between really testing them, challenging
0:53:32 them, pushing them, but also accepting when they’re not going to be very good at something,
0:53:35 acknowledge when they’re not going to enjoy something. I mean, I’m struggling with this
0:53:39 in my seven-year-old at the moment. I’m obsessed with reading books. I read books all the time.
0:53:43 He tells me he doesn’t really like reading books. So we’re in a continual
0:53:49 standoff where I, of course, say to myself, “Oh, he just says that, and I just need to find the
0:53:54 right book for him.” So the poor boy is now buried under 200 different books that I’ve
0:53:59 tried to produce in the hope that I can. And I come up with every kind of bribe and trick
0:54:03 and story to try to get him to do these things. Maybe at some point, I have to acknowledge that
0:54:06 he actually, when he says he wants to play football instead of reading a book, he genuinely does
0:54:10 want to play football instead of reading a book. Let me just say it gets worse.
0:54:19 I have the same issue around, I would really like to inspire my kids to get their face out of
0:54:23 other phones and to read more. And for me, it was in junior high school, this great book series
0:54:27 called “The Great Brain” about a young kid who is smart and funny. Do you know this?
0:54:29 Oh, I’m going to write that down.
0:54:34 That was wonderful. It was just really fun. It was about a kid in, I think, 19th century
0:54:39 middle America, and just his adventures and how he was always kind of, I know,
0:54:45 was kind of very mark twain like. And then as I got into high school, I started reading John Irving,
0:54:50 and I just thought that was so wonderful. Anyways, your turn. What, if I were to try
0:54:55 and put a book in front of my 17 or 14 year old that might inspire them or reignite them,
0:54:57 their interest in reading, what are two or three titles you would recommend?
0:55:06 Well, I think getting people into really good short detective and spy fiction is a great way
0:55:13 of developing people’s literary tastes and skills while having fun. So I think Michael Connolly,
0:55:17 who writes these amazing Los Angeles police detective procedural novels, is great.
0:55:24 The Harry Bosch series, I think, John Le Carré’s spy stories, I mean, it’s a little bit more adult,
0:55:31 but he is an extraordinary pro stylist. There’s a great French detective writer, George Cimanon,
0:55:36 but it’s very short books and may great novels. But I also think nonfiction is fantastic.
0:55:42 There’s some great stuff for us recently about, well, I think that you’ve all know Harari’s
0:55:50 Sapiens is a great thing for a young adult to get into. There’s an American academic at Edinburgh
0:55:53 called Steve Bruce. He’s written a great book called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,
0:56:00 which I’d recommend. It’s a lovely book because he’s explaining some pretty complex stuff about
0:56:08 paleontology through stories of his friends in Poland and his adventures. So I’d be trying to
0:56:14 ship that at them. I think historical novels can also be a great way through.
0:56:19 I don’t know how young your youngest son is, maybe a little old now, but there’s a series
0:56:24 called the Young Samurai series set in Tokugawa, Japan for about 1600.
0:56:26 Do you see Shogun?
0:56:29 Yeah, exactly. It’s very much Shogun for children.
0:56:29 Wonderful.
0:56:31 I read Shogun when I was 15 and loved it.
0:56:37 Yeah, James Clavel. I remember that. I like all of those. Rory Stewart is the former UK
0:56:41 Secretary of State for International Development and co-host of the popular podcast The Rest is
0:56:47 Politics. He serves as a senior advisor to give directly a notable direct cash charity and his
0:56:52 professor in the practice of grand strategy at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
0:56:55 Rory is also the author of several books, including The Places in Between, How Not to
0:57:01 Be a Politician and Politics on the Edge. I could go on forever, but the thing I found so interesting
0:57:07 here is that he walked on foot for two years across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India,
0:57:15 and Nepal in 2002. Rory, I could not disagree with you more on Israel, but I find you are so
0:57:22 sober and thoughtful and reserved and intellectually honest about your comments,
0:57:27 that it softens the beach for me, and while I haven’t changed my view, I do learn.
0:57:32 And I hope that more people are exposed to you and your views, because even if they don’t change
0:57:37 their mind, it just helps us all move forward and think, all right, there’s got to be a way
0:57:41 we can find common ground here. Thank you for your good work. I really enjoyed this conversation.
0:57:43 Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate it.
0:58:01 Out of happiness, I was really moved by a TikTok I saw of a young woman who was talking,
0:58:07 she had left her house for the first time without a wig. She suffers from alopecia,
0:58:12 has some baldness, hair loss, whatever you want to call it. And she said it was the first time
0:58:17 she’d left her house without a wig, and it was a very trying and emotional moment for her,
0:58:22 and that she wasn’t going to let alopecia rule her life. And I really related to it in the sense
0:58:30 that I think as young people, we’re just so focused, we’re so insecure, we’re insecure beings,
0:58:35 and we’re insecure for a reason. You’re meant to be worried about shit, because that’s a survival
0:58:40 instinct. You’re meant to worry about what others think about you, because being shaming and kicked
0:58:46 out of the tribe meant certain death. So shame and also your attractiveness to mates wanting to be
0:58:53 attractive such that the species propagate. I think that men are especially susceptible to
0:59:00 shaming around their economic viability, and women are unfairly judged based on their aesthetics.
0:59:03 So I think there can be especially insecure around their looks, especially young people.
0:59:10 And it kind of took me back to when I lost my hair. Believe it or not, my hair used to be one
0:59:14 of my best features. I had a ponytail in graduate school, which is an image, isn’t it? And then
0:59:19 when I started losing my hair, it was just sort of devastating is the wrong word, but it was really
0:59:23 upsetting. And the worst thing about losing your hair is the losing part. It’s great to have a full
0:59:29 head of hair. It’s great, in my opinion, to be bald. I love having a shaved head. But the in-between
0:59:33 is what sucked. And it used to be a huge source of insecurity and upset for me that I was losing
0:59:37 what I thought was my best feature. And obviously it represents the loss of masculinity and youth and
0:59:43 all those good things. But what I would say to anyone who’s struggling with one thing about their
0:59:49 physical appearance, keep in mind that people just look at you and they make an assessment
0:59:55 on the whole you. And I was looking at this woman, she had really cool nails and beautiful skin and
1:00:01 a nice smile. And I remember thinking that people who look at her or men that look at her think,
1:00:05 oh, there’s a nice looking woman. And they might think, if they look closely, oh, she has hair loss,
1:00:10 but they don’t, it’s not that what they zero in on. They zero in on how the whole person,
1:00:15 your personality, your intellect, your character, your smile, your clothes, the way you dress.
1:00:20 So my advice to young people is to lean into your strengths. I started working out such that
1:00:28 I could take advantage of some of my strengths. And I tried to take some pride in the way I dress,
1:00:33 despite the fact that losing your hair in your 20s is not a very good look. I also had terrible
1:00:38 acne when I was younger. And I started getting scarring on my face, which I was really self-conscious
1:00:43 about. And then I remember telling my ex-wife that I was so self-conscious about my acne scars.
1:00:48 And she looked at me and she said, where do you have acne scars? And I thought, wow, people really
1:00:54 don’t notice what you think they’re noticing. And so what you’re going to be upset about when you get
1:01:02 older is not that you had acne, not that you had hair loss, not that you’re a little bit overweight,
1:01:07 whatever it might be, you’re going to be upset at how upset you were. Don’t focus on the little
1:01:11 things. Don’t focus on what’s wrong with you. The thing you’re going to be upset about is looking
1:01:15 back. You’re going to wish you’d been kinder to yourself. You’re going to realize that you were
1:01:22 better looking than you thought. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren. Jennifer Sanchez
1:01:27 is our associate producer. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening
1:01:31 to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No
1:01:37 Mercy, No Mouse, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod wherever you
1:01:40 get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
1:01:51 Whew. I got a zit coming out of my face. I’ve not a zit in a while.
1:02:02 Makes me feel 18 again, actually makes me feel 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 again. Oh my god.
Rory Stewart, the former UK Secretary of State for International Development and cohost of the popular podcast, The Rest is Politics, joins Scott to discuss geopolitics, the state of politics in the US and the UK, and his recent TEDTalk where he advocates for a radical way to address extreme poverty worldwide.
Follow Rory, @RoryStewartUK.
Scott opens with his thoughts on Governor Newsom vetoing SB 1047, an AI safety bill. He then gets into more news out of California, specifically the banning of legacy and donor admissions at private universities.
Algebra of happiness: lean into your strengths.
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