The Jordan Harbinger Show - 867: Rory Stewart | Walking Across Afghanistan and Iran

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

GiveDirectly President Rory Stewart talks about "mad" politics, long walks in warzones, and ensuring our charitable donations actually aid people in need. What We Discuss with Rory Stewart: What makes the UK's system of government "slightly mad" (even when compared to that of the US)? How the kind of skills that get someone elected as a politician can get in the way of governing well. How did Rory survive a walk across post-9/11 Afghanistan — just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, in the middle of winter, during a war, stalked by hungry wolves — despite being "guaranteed" it would mean certain death? What it was like to be one of the first people to see the ruins of a once-thriving city since Genghis Khan had destroyed it over 800 years before. How we can ensure that every penny of our charitable donations to developing places like Afghanistan and Kenya helps the people who really need it instead of stuffing the pockets of warlords, corrupt officials, and middlemen. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/867 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. When you think about confrontation with China, war with Russia over Ukraine, artificial intelligence, I mean, we're facing these unbelievable challenges. And the truth is that politicians in the United States, in Britain, in Europe,

are simply not qualified to think hard about what the threats are of some autonomous general artificial intelligence. Because, as you say, they can't even turn on their phones. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional

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It's a gem from an or two from an older episode that I go. through and reanalyze. A lot of good feedback from you all so far. Really appreciating that from you. I'm enjoying writing it. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news. Get on there and let me know what you think. Today, a fascinating guy. Rory Stewart was a member of the British Parliament for almost a decade. He has so many jobs and so many creds that I would need lunch in a liter of water to get through his bio. So I'm going to just get to the juicy part we're talking about here today. he traveled 6,000 miles on foot across Asia, including Afghanistan. He's, of course, written books about this, but just walking across Afghanistan is just

absolutely bananas. And of course, Nepal and Iran, I mean, this guy is really, really something. He was also a member of parliament during Brexit, former diplomat, head of the UK Aid Department, which had a $20 billion annual budget, think USAID. He goes to Afghanistan and says, I'm going to walk across this. and one of the officials says, you are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It's basically the security services guy. He says, it's midwinter.

There are three meters of snow on the high passes, so like 10 feet, nine feet. There are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. So what does this guy do? He goes great, and he goes and does the walk anyway. And, well, he made it. He's here with us now. A trek like this is something that I'd expect to hear about some British guy with a monocle doing in 1865,

not somebody doing it right after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. So absolutely fascinating guy, some kind of genius slash the luckiest man that I've ever had on the show in terms of dodging bullets and staying alive. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Rory Stewart. And by the way, he runs a charity. We're going to be running a fundraiser for that charity over at give directly.com slash Jordan. More info on that coming up here in the episode. Enjoy. Well, first of all, thanks for doing the show.

I appreciate it. I know you're busy. Great pleasure. I have to say, I needed a snack and a glass of water to make it through your bio. You've done a lot of people have done a lot. You've done a lot, not just even in work, but in travel, it's really something. Thank you. Thank you.

I hope you had a cookie and a cup of tea to get you through it. Yeah, yes. I asked during the sound check what you had for breakfast and you said a cookie and a cup of tea, which that's the secret to getting so much done is just stay malnoury. but well hydrated, I guess. Exactly. A lot of sugar, a lot of caffeine. Everything's fine. Your government positions are really eclectic. I mean, maybe this is a British thing or a UK thing, but I have to say it's odd to see somebody who is Secretary of State for International Development, then the prisons minister, then the minister for Africa, then the development minister for

the Middle East and Asia, and then the environment. It's like, these are not unimportant positions that some crony gets because his dad works in the government. I mean, your range of knowledge is really, it's really got to be extraordinary. Well, Jordan, that's very kind. The truth of the matter is that the British system is a slightly mad system and we take all our ministers, including our cabinet ministers, out of parliament. So it would be like trying to appoint the US cabinet out of just the congressmen and senators. Okay. And the result is pretty bad because you've got quite a limited gene pool that you're drawing from. And it's a very weird system. And as you say, the risk is that when I took over as prisons minister, I had not been in a prison for 20 years. I used to teach

drama in a prison when I was at university. And I was very struck by how underqualified I was and how much learning I had to do, because as you say, it's pretty serious. I was responsible for all the prisons in the country, everything, all the jails, all the prisons, every state, we don't have the distinction you have between state and federal. And I then went to the states and I looked around Rikers Island and I went to the Cook County Jail and I went to the tombs in Manhattan. It saw the scale of the U.S. prison system

and the problems you're facing at every different kind of level, which only kind of deepened my sense of how overwhelming this is, trying to work out how you produce clean, safe conditions for prisoners, how you protect prison officers, how you stop drugs getting in.

Well, we don't. That's, I think, the trick is we don't do that. Well, the great thing, of course, is when you visit an American prison, you get a great PR story. I left thinking, wow, these guys really know what they're doing. So I'm reassured to hear that you think that isn't the case. No, I mean, look, I'm assuming that like any system in government,

there's a lot of people that are doing their best. But I think there's a lot of people that can't do anything with the hand that they're dealt, really, in the prison system. We all hear about drugs, violence, gangs, and prisons, a lot of the corrections officers, the ones that are trying to do a good job. A lot of times they end up injured or dead or, or, whatever, and a lot of the ones that you hear about in the news are also corrupt and don't belong there, and they don't hire very well, so your colleagues are terrible, even if you're good.

I mean, it's the whole, you don't want to go to prison, even if you work in the prison and you're not an inmate. I visited and worked with some prisons in a volunteer capacity, and people who listen to the show will know that I took 72 show fans to a maximum security prison on my 40th birthday a few years ago. And the amount of human potential that is stuck in American prisons, probably all prisons, but especially the ones that I've seen firsthand anyways, in the American prison system, even in maximum security prisons, you get guys that have been there since they were 16. And before that, they were in juvenile detention. And it's just, it's a shame because they have brilliant, I go in there as a business owner sort of thing. And they say, well, I got this dumb idea,

but when I get out, I'm going to do this. And they'll lay out an idea that is, is not only a great idea, but it's also a multi-billion-dollar company in its own right for collecting junk around the, in recycling it, or creating a certain kind of program, or they have ideas for inventions that, yes, they don't necessarily have the scientific background to create it, but it's a brilliant idea. They've never heard of it, and it's already in nascent phases in whatever industry. And it's just, it's incredible. You get people who, if they just had not had a terrible childhood and absolutely no resources would be on the front page of Forbes. And so it's, the whole thing is sad to me. It's tragic. And I've actually just finished a book, which will be

published in the States in September called How Not to Be a Politician. And this is partly about how immense the challenges we face are in all our societies, US, Britain, how populism gets in the way of this. And populism basically produces simple black and white answers to problems when problems are pretty complicated and intense. And it's about trying to explain how the kind of skills that get you elected as a politician get in the way of governing well, stop you being able to make the right decisions because you've almost rewired your brain in order to raise money and get the votes and get out campaigning and kill the other political party.

And suddenly, you're running something like a prison system where you need to think very, very seriously about how do we drop reoffending rates? How do we look at the best evidence and data on this? Are we getting our sentencing right? And you're completely, certainly in my experience, as a politician, totally unqualified to make those kinds of policy decisions. Yeah, it sounds like, at least in the British system, you can't even necessarily pick the best expert because you have to pick from your MPs or the, am I getting the terminology correct? I don't virtually nothing about your system. Exactly. Yeah. 100% because the politicians run everything.

And that's meant to be democratic. I mean, it's true. I'm democratically accountable. I'm an elected person. But there's a real issue, both about expertise, and there's also an issue about people moving out of their jobs very quickly. Often you're only in the role for a couple of years, and then you're on and somebody else is in,

and that's no way to run anything. No, you want somebody with 20 years of experience. I don't suppose you saw those hearings with Mark Zuckerberg explaining to a bunch of sort of 60 and 70-year-old plus congressmen how Facebook works and it was just like, it was kind of funny, but it was like, oh my gosh, we're never going to get anything legislated because he's having to explain things that like my 12 year old niece really kind of has a good grasp of, even though she's not technical in any capacity. When you think about, you know, confrontation with China, war with Russia over

Ukraine, artificial intelligence, I mean, we're facing these unbelievable challenges. And the truth is that politicians in the United States, in Britain, in Europe, are simply not qualified to think hard about what the threats are of some autonomous general artificial intelligence. Because as you say, they can't even turn on their phones. Yeah, well, well said. All right, we have so much that I would love to talk about and, of course, limited time as always.

But I'd love to just jump ahead to your walk across and tell me if I'm missing anything. Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Am I leaving anything out? Bhutan, I guess, or did you walk around? You got it. No, I didn't walk across Utah. But I can't imagine doing that. It sounds insanely interesting, but also just plain insane to walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan. India alone and Nepal seemed dangerous enough, but Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan after 9-11, it just seems if the weather doesn't kill you and the people don't kill you. There's wolves. I mean, there's cliffs and there's landmines. Well, it's a kind of holiday

Jordan, I believe that you go on. It is. Yeah, exactly. It's your kind of tourism. Yeah, so I walked across Afghanistan just after 9-11, and it was an amazing time to walk across the country. It was the middle of the winter. I was walking with a giant dog, and the Taliban government had just fallen, but the new government hadn't emerged. I walked across Nepal when the Maoist guerrillas, this kind of weird left-wing guerrilla group had seized the west of the country, so I was walking through checkpoints for child soldiers a lot. But I think the main thing I took away from it wasn't the few moments of danger. It was more just how wonderful it was to have the privilege to spend 550 nights in village houses to be able to sit on people's floors and hear them talk about

their government, their religion, their lives. And it changed my life because I had been a British diplomat. worked for Arakwif and the Foreign Service. And I've been stuck in these embassies and suddenly I was able to be in villages. I was able to be hundreds of miles outside the capital city, sometimes 10 days walk from the nearest road and get a totally different perspective on a place like Afghanistan. Well, first of all, where did you stay? Did you really just show up in a village and say, hey, it's getting dark. Can I sleep on your floor? Yeah, it all depends on incredibly over-the-top politeness, particularly in Afghanistan. So you say, al-a-a-a-a-a-shti, shatristan,

so you're saying, peace be with you. How are you? I hope you're good. I hope your soul is flourishing. May you live long. May you not be tired. And you go on like this. And then eventually somebody puts you up on their floor.

They just interrupt you and go, all right, enough already. You can sleep in the barn. That's really interesting. And they feed you, too? Yeah, so, I mean, these communities have very little, so you're often eating bread or rice, and I would hide a $10 bill behind the cushion in the house

when I left in the morning because my host would never take money. I figured as much. Yeah, there's no Ramada in the middle of Afghanistan, Iran, Paris, rural areas. No, there's not. And so you have to find a way of trying to make sure that you can compensate the people who put you up for feeding you,

but they would be offended if you try to offer them payment. But they're not offended if they think. find $10 stuck in the bed three weeks later, three days later. Hopefully how many days later, maybe they're like, whoa, what's that? By then I'm long gone. They're long gone. Then they've got to figure out what to do with that. I guess there's probably more than one sheep herder in Afghanistan rolling up a cigarette

with a U.S. 10 at some point in the last few years. Or maybe trying to track me down to give it back. Running down the path towards the border. This is probably a dumb question, but I've died. How did you get enough protein if you're just eating bread and rice, but you're walking thousands of miles, I assume? Yeah, I walked 20, 25 miles a day. So I walked through most of the daylight every day. And I was surprised that I could keep going. But I found out later that a lot of the bread, particularly in Central Afghanistan, is provided by the World Food Program and has nutrients

stuffed in it. So that was probably a help. I talked to a doctor about it and he said, I said, am I going to get scurvy? And he said, no, if you eat vegetables, let's say once every two weeks, you should be fine. And that's where I developed my fantastic diet of cookies and tea. You hear that everybody? Vegetables once every two weeks. Don't believe the hype. Just once every two weeks. No need. No need. I hope my mom hears this. See, Mom, I didn't have to eat all that crap. And the moments of danger that you mention, few and far between from maybe people and wolves and landmines, but just the weather in Afghanistan and Iran, was it not snowing? I mean, they get some crazy, crazy bad weather in the And this walk took, was it two years?

Yeah. So I crossed Afghanistan in midwinter, and you're right, it gets very, very cold. I remember crossing a snowplane in the center of Afghanistan, and I set off, and it was about a 20-mile walk from one village to the next. So I guess it'd take me probably seven hours to do. And I'd been going about three hours, and the snow was quite thick, and I wasn't making as much progress as I hoped. and I could see on the path in front of me something. I couldn't quite work out what it was. And when I got up to it, I realized it was a man who had died of exposure crossing the snowplane

in the other direction. I could see his footprints behind him. Oh, wow. And he had two plastic bags over his hands. He'd obviously been trying to keep his hands warm with transparent plastic bags. And I remember that because I remember seeing his hands and seeing this poor guy. and feeling how tragic this was that somebody must have been waiting for him at the other end or waiting for him from where he'd come. And I had another, I guess, 12, 14 miles to go before I could tell anyone about it.

How do you even know that you're going to find a place to stay in those places? I mean, I assume you're looking at detailed maps and you're going, there's a village here. But do you know it's still there? Do you know that they're going to be hospitable or not? I mean, you don't really know. I'm very reliant on the previous village. Because it's a country where people walk, people will say, I don't know if you were, if you were in Connecticut, somebody would say, oh, well, you know, you've got a one day's walk from New Haven to Guilford. But if you say, how far is it from New Haven to Boston? They begin bluffing a bit because you're getting a long way beyond their own experience.

But I remember coming across an old guy in Bamian in Afghanistan, and he said, wherever you come from, and I said, I've walked from Harat. He said, how long did it take you? And I said, 14 days. And he said, oh, that's rubbish. My grandfather did it in 12 days. So he clearly had a kind of memory of times of people walking. And it was uphill both ways when his grandfather told him about that story.

Definitely. And in the snow. So who made this safe for you? You said you walked with a huge dog. Did you just find the dog along the way? Did you buy it? I found the dog and bought it from some villages who I thought were maltreating the dogs. So I thought I'd take the dog with me.

and he was a wonderful great big beast. I mean, he was a beautiful looking animal. But the size of almost a great day, I mean, enormous, enormous animal. But really what kept me alive and safe was, were the villagers, that in a way, as a single man traveling alone, I felt I was almost more safe than if I'd been one of two people, that you're less threatening.

Yeah. People think you're a bit kind of crazy, but there's no kind of macho, I'm going to take these guys down. And when I was stopped by the Taliban, I was stopped by Taliban gunmen in an area called Maidan Shah. And there, they began getting a bit aggressive. So they said, you know, where are you from? Where are you going?

And I said, al-A-A-Lu, peace be with you. And they said, where are you from? And I said, do you not speak Dari? I said, al-Salam al-leuk, peace be with you. And they very reluctantly said, and peace be with you. So I said, and how is your health? And very grumply, they said, God be praised. My health is fine.

how's your health? And I said, you know, we're going like this. And after about a minute of this, the tensions calm down a little bit. And then I can say, you know, whatever, whatever nonsense I'm telling them to avoid them killing me. Yeah. Wow. So you just forced them to go through the social custom. They must have been so annoyed by that. Like, oh, gosh, I've been told if I don't say this back, I'm going to face some sort of divine punishment. So fine. Yeah, I think it's important to make someone recognize you as a human. I think it's always important. Yeah, that must have kind of been a close call because if somebody, if I lived out there and some white dude shows up and says, I'm just a British guy walking through Afghanistan and Iran, I'm just not going to believe you, I think.

No, no, I said I was an Indonesian professor of history. I guess you probably believe that even less. Well, I don't know. It depends on your level of education, I guess. Why Indonesia? Because it's a Muslim country, but it's far away. And because I spoke Indonesian. just in case somebody wanted to ask me about Indonesia. I was posted in Indonesia as a diplomat, so that was my best hope. Are Indonesian people not Asian looking, though? I'm just going off. Yeah, so I'm gambling hard that the Afghan I'm talking to is not aware of that.

I'm an albino mixed Indonesia. I mean, it's just like, I guess if they've never met anyone from Indonesia and they don't have television or internet, you've got a fighting chance. That's a funny bluff, though. But it makes sense, right? Because Indonesia is a sort of famously Islamic country and yet it's far enough away that you're probably not going to meet someone

who's like, nonsense. I lived there for 20 years. Yeah. And I was hoping that if they did that, I could bluff my way in Indonesia and try my best. Wow. So you speak, you said Dari. Is it Pashto also?

I don't speak Pashto. Pashto is very widely spoken in the south of Afghanistan. I don't speak it at all. I only speak Dari, which is the northern language. And then Iran, do you speak Farsi as well? So Farsi and Dari are basically the same language. They're very closely related. And a lot of these languages, I didn't really realize this until I was walking,

that even Urdu and Nepali, these languages are related like Spanish and Italian. So it's not a huge leap. And often people in Nepal or in Afghanistan would speak a bit of Urdu anyway because they'd watch Bollywood movies. So even if you muddled up your words a bit, people could kind of get what you were going on about. Wow, that's really cool. So you sort of picked up a bunch of different little, I would imagine, dialects. And if these villages are this far away, they're not really connected by a lot of traffic.

Do they develop their own little dialect in the village areas? Yeah, they've got very strong, very strong dialects. I think the interesting thing is that they tend not to speak in the hard dialect with a foreigner. They kind of try to speak more simply. But you're completely right. When I got to the capital cities, people would say, how could you talk to people in those villages? I don't understand what those people are saying. But I think it would be like my going to West Virginia and somebody taking pity on me and thinking,

okay, I'm not going to put on the full extreme accent here in order to communicate. Yeah, you're not going to get the coal miner dialect that they speak after three beers. You're going to get the, how do we talk to these Yankees again? Let me think. What do they say? I remember when I was a little kid asking my dad why people talked funny in rural Florida, and he was like, you've got to stop saying that in front of people because you'd get these looks like, oh yeah, we talk funny, huh, pal? There must be so many memorable experiences and standouts during

this walk. It's probably hard to narrow it down to a couple, but are there certain times where like the man with the bags on his hand where you just thought, wow, this is something that is going to change my life forever or perhaps a close call that almost change it for the worst? It's quite difficult to put my finger on it. But the thing that was the most moving experience was towards the end of my walk across Afghanistan, actually on the same day at which I had made it through this Taliban checkpoint, I ended up sleeping on the floor of a small military barracks with some very, very frightened Afghan soldiers and sharing my food with them. And I remember feeling for the first time so lucky to be with them. I was so tired. I'd been walking then for nearly 28 days without a break,

living on bread. And they were frightened, I was frightened, they were hungry, I was hungry, they were cold, I was cold. And I felt a kind of wonderful sense of brotherhood or equality. It was a very humbling experience, but also a very energizing experience. It's difficult because I want to say it was the moment where I came across a lost city, which I did in the central mountains of Afghanistan, but it wasn't really that. It was that day with those soldiers on the floor. Well, first of all, that is incredible, but you can't just drop lost city and be like, well, it wasn't that. You discovered, you came across a lost city. Tell me about that. I came across a city that had been uncovered by villagers in about the three weeks before I arrived,

and it was a city from the 12th century that had been destroyed by Genghis Khan called the City of the Turkwaz Mountain, and it had been lost to history. No one had any idea where it had been. And I arrived and I found villages in this very deserted valley in the very center of Afghanistan, digging into the hillside and pulling out carved wooden doors, ivory chess pieces, fragments of Chinese porcelain. and the capital of an empire that once stretched from Delhi and India to Baghdad in Iraq, including some extraordinary things, like Hebrew tombstones from a Jewish community and things.

What? How many people lived in that city back, of course, when it existed? It would have been a huge city back then. I mean, I guess 30, 40,000 people. Wow. But now totally deserted in the middle of nowhere. And all that remained of it was this amazing minaret, 165 feet high with turquoise blue tiles around the neck, which had been first spotted by a foreigner in 1956,

but the archaeologists had dug around the base, found nothing else, and concluded that maybe this was just a tower on its own. They'd had no idea, really, there was a city around it. That is incredible. I mean, the idea that they're finding all these artifacts there that nobody had been there since, well, really, had been there since it had been sacked in,

and my history is terrible. One would con... King is Khan. Early 1,200s. So this thing has been left alone for 800-plus whatever years, that is just unbelievable. So now I assume there's a zillion archaeologists still working on this. Archaeology's turned up,

but unfortunately too late. The villagers basically looted it. That's another problem in Afghanistan. I almost felt at the time I need to sort of sit here and kind of control the site and stop people from doing this, which of course I wasn't able to do.

I mean, it was a ridiculous idea anyway because they weren't going to particularly listen to some strange foreigner trying to rush up and down and saying, stop doing that, stop doing that, don't do that. That is painful to hear because, as I'm sure you know, but just for listeners,

I've done episodes on basically antiquities theft. And the problem is it's not the item that you dig up that's in the villagers house that says, okay, sure, I'll sell this to you for $25. It's an ivory chess piece. It's the digging around it with the, you know, you see the guys in the TV or the cartoons of the little paintbrush

and the little tiny tools. It's all the layers. And when you rip something out of the ground, those layers are gone, they're destroyed. So you just never know the context in which this thing was buried. You don't know if it had been on a guy's body which was covered in leather,

and then that was that, because that's all just gone and it's lost forever. It's just really, ah, it's such a shame. It's a great, great pity. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rory Stewart.

We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free in our six-minute networking course over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is all about improving

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You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Rory Stewart. I love some of the travel tips that you have, one of which was open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been, mind. That's a travel tip I hope I never have to use, but I assume you probably had a few of those. I mean, did somebody say, hey, by the way, don't walk across that field. It's been mine. Oh, how do you know? There's no sheep on it? Exactly. You get it from other people.

So another tip that I believe in strongly is people often say, you know, how much money are you carrying. The truth of the matter is that if people don't see how much money you're carrying, it doesn't matter how much money you're carrying. The amount of money you're carrying if it's concealed doesn't increase the chance of you being robbed. It just increases the amount you lose when you are robbed. That's my second insight. My third insight is basically you don't need to carry any of the stuff you think you need to carry. I mean, it took me a long time to accept this, but you don't need a head torch.

You don't need to be able to see at night. That's a luxury. You basically don't need a book. I carried chlorine tablets, so you don't really need to carry too much water. And you don't need a tent. you can just put a bivy bag outside your sleeping bag, and you don't need a cooking stove. You can just eat cold food.

And all those things I think are important because if you're walking 25, 30 miles a day, every extra pound you're going to curse by the last hour of that day. I can only imagine. I mean, that's a, for somebody who walks five, sometimes 10 miles a day, sometimes a pack, sometimes without, doing twice that or more in snow for a year, it just sounds nightmarish.

You must have been completely jacked by the end of that, despite the protein situation. I was fit, but I was a pretty scrawny, underfed individual. Yeah, I think it would have been like a 97-pound soaking wet

kind of ripped as opposed to meat on the bones kind of ripped. Yeah, exactly. Surely everyone you met there thought you were some kind of spy, right? You're walking around with maps

and you speak the language fluently. That's just too sus. But weirdly, nobody thought I was a spy. Nobody really was very, was very curious about me. One of the interesting thing about villages is that they didn't ask many questions. I think it's the fundamental truth about humanity. People prefer to talk about themselves rather than ask questions about other people. But I guess, I mean, to sort of segue a little bit, I think the biggest lesson I took from the walk is about global poverty. I was staying with

some of the very, very poorest people in the world. And I was seeing a lot of really bad aid programs, really kind of crappy development programs. And a lot of these villages I went to, I was seeing big signs saying, gift to the Norwegian people or gift to the Swedish people, and these were abandoned schools, abandoned wells, crumbling toilet blocks, and such a deep level of cynicism

from the local villages about what on earth these foreigners thought they were doing, spending all this money and delivering basically no benefit to these villages. So what I do now, I'm now the president of an organization called Give Directly, which is trying to very radically change the way that we do international development. And our big insight, I guess, is to try to get rid of all of that and just give people cash and let the villagers have the cash and sort out their own business rather than us

telling them what to do. I do want to talk a little bit about aid and how it's wasted. I did a show about dictators, episodes 794 and 795. And one of his main points was bad regimes, authoritarian dictator type leaders, they love aid and they never actually want to solve the problem the aid is for because the last thing you want to do is say, hey, I don't need those millions of dollars you're pumping into my economy every year or every month. Find another place to go help. You want to make the tiniest incremental step, if at all, just so that the tap stays on for as long as possible. So it sounds like you're taking the opposite approach. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's so much that's wrong with it.

There's the problem of the dictator, but then there's the problem of us, broadly speaking, generous people from what we would call the global North, Americans, Europeans, Brits. The problem with us is that there's a lot of vanity involved in doing aid, and there's a lot of slightly condescending views of the extreme poor. So let me just give you two examples of that. We basically believe that you should be giving people cash. And the two problems with that are,

firstly from people who say, that just sounds dumb. You know, I want to contribute my brain. I want to contribute my intelligence. I want to invent a children's seesaw, which when they sit on it also pumps water. Or I've got this amazing insight, which is chickens have eggs. And maybe if I give people chickens, their eggs will have more chickens. And they don't want to say to their friends when they're showing off, I just give cash. They want to say, I'm doing some really clever thing.

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

you know much more about them than you really know, and that you can be teaching them stuff that's relevant to their lives. And there have been two revolutions in international development. One is, in Africa now, people basically keep money on their phones. Their phones are their bank accounts, which allows us now to deliver money directly to people's phones without going through governments or middle people. And the second thing is there's been an explosion in what we call randomized control tests.

They're like medical studies where you have a control group and a treatment group, You give cash to one, you don't give cash the other. You study over as much as 12 years, and the results are unbelievable. Turns out if you give people cash, it's better than almost any other program, for nutrition, for education enrollment, for health, for shelter, and just study up, say, 350 studies. The problem is convincing people of this is so difficult because we have a huge psychological block on cash.

Of course, the gut reaction for this is, Just as somebody who's looked into this and dealt with Give Directly, and by the way, before I forget, I'm going to mention this a few times on the show. We're doing a Give Directly fundraiser. We're going to attempt to lift an entire village in Kenya out of extreme poverty by delivering cash donations with no strings attached, a la Give Directly. A kindhearted donor is going to be doubling our donations. So if we gather 20,000, it'll transform into a $40,000 total donation, bringing hope to families that struggle to afford even the most basic necessities of life. Give Directly is the first NGO helping the inhabitants of Namani. This is a very, very remote rural Kenyan village. Our goal is to give $1,000 each to all 36 families, so that's almost 200 people residing in the village of Namani. It is in the Khalifi region of Kenya. This place has no water regularly. The pipes go dry for a week at a time. Medical care is too far away. Most people can't get there. Seven families out of the entire 36 family village have a place to sleep that is permanent. The rest of the folks are kind of building temporary stuff or just not anywhere. Education.

is $3 a semester, and over half of the residents can't send their kids to school because they don't have $3 per semester. Despite these hardships, we are really hopeful that these families are going to utilize the cash donations and address their most urgent needs and lay the foundation for a brighter future. They're going to be buying land for farming, covering school fees to educate their kids, buying livestock like goats that can endure the drought. They're going to improve their homes, metal roofs, protection against the elements, cement floors, they're not sleeping in the dirt, that kind of stuff. They're going to be starting businesses.

I just think this is going to be amazing. I want to follow this journey. I will give you guys updates as well, but we need your support. Of course, I'm donating, but I would love to have your support as well. Go to give directly.com slash Jordan to donate. Donations are tax deductible in the U.S. If you're overseas and you're like, oh, I can't support your mattress sponsors and whatnot, definitely go to give directly.com slash Jordan and support the show that way.

And if you email me a screenshot of your donation, I will send you a personalized video thanking you. give directly.com slash Jordan. Very exciting project. I was worried initially. I said, don't people just kind of take it and spend it on crap? I mean, not necessarily beer and cigarettes and booze or whatever. I would be worried about that too. But just somebody who's never had a bunch of money,

why would you give them $850 bucks? Aren't they just going to go great? Now I'm going to buy this thing that has temporary value. I mean, how do we know they're going to spend this well? That's the objection I think most people are sitting with. Such a good question. Well, the reason we know that they're spending it well is through these randomized control tests where we study very, very carefully how people spend the money and look at the results

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

We encourage them to visit a neighboring village that's already had the money so they can see how other people have spent the money, get ideas, talk about it. And often we give it, in three installments. So you'd get first $100 to spend that, think about how you did that, then you get another installment in a few weeks' time. The results is that people spend it very, very practically. What we tend to find is people will buy a cow so that they can have some milk and some calves, get their kids back into school. If they don't have a toilet, they'll dig a little toilet block for some sanitation. They'll fix their grass roof. And if they've got a bit left over, they'll invest in a small business, tailoring shop, bicycle to move their milk or yogurt to the market,

or they'll set up a little savings group with other people in the community, which allows them to take out money less regularly, but a larger sum of money. So it's very practical, and I guess that's just because if you were in that desperate need, that money is literally the difference between life and death. You're not going to spend it on something dumb. That does make sense. I've looked at, of course, the Give Directly website, which will link in the show notes, and there's groups of women who had sort of pooled their money, I guess, and decided to get running water in the village, which was incredible. Talk about a selfless act where they could have spent that money on anything,

even their own home, and they decided that they were all going to get running water for the village. I hope they were able to, I hate that I'm saying this, monetize that so they could get their donation back in some way and actually do something that's only for themselves when they did this selfless act. You're right. People do do a lot of that. It's very striking. I mean, you'll see that villages will often run the last mile to connect to electricity. They'll dig the last bit of the road to connect to the main road network. So often people pull their money together.

But the great thing is, of course, they do it much more cost efficiently. If you were to go to an international charity and say, we need to supply water to this village, engineers would arrive, plans would be written, strategies would be written, big land cruisers would turn up, and you'd end up spending a fortune doing that. Whereas the villagers make every dollar go so far because they're digging the pipes themselves, they're laying at themselves. They are really trying to save their money.

I remember one of the aid examples in the dictator episode, he made a pretty compelling argument for aid being a net negative in many ways, and there's something called Tide Aid. So the example was in Bangladesh they have ferries, so boats that take people across, I guess, some river or lake. And Denmark was like, hey, we're going to repair these ferry boats because they're in terrible condition and they sink and they kill people, they ended up spending over 400% more because what they did is instead of having these

ferries repaired at a shipyard in Bangladesh, they shipped them to Denmark so that they were essentially subsidizing the ship industry in Denmark and repairing these ferries and then shipping the back. It was ridiculous. It's heartbreaking and I'm afraid we all do it. The United States still, if there's a famine in the Horn of Africa, will export maize, which has grown in Idaho, huge costs. So you pay farmers in Idaho to grow it. You put it on a plane or a ship.

You take it halfway around the world. You drop it on a community whose priority is often something quite different, like they need shelter, they need a tent, or they need some medical care. They end up selling the maze for cash at a huge discount and then trying to buy what they need with the cash. And you've wasted this incredible amount of money. So they end up getting 5% of what the US taxpayer has actually spent on trying to help them. It's really gross. And some of this is done because you're subsidizing

the local industry, so it's easier to say you were going to give a hundred million dollar need to a country than it is to say, well, we're going to give a tractor industry a hundred million dollars. And then people go, well, what the hell? What about our industry? No, no, no. We're giving food to poor people in Africa. Oh, well, all right. Fine. There's no way for me to drift off that. That's exactly right. And of course, you're thinking about your political lobbies. You're thinking about the fact that the farmer in Idaho wants to be subsidized to grow maize. So the fact that it may be better for the Somali to get cash and might be better for Somali farmers because they could grow some of their own food gets pushed out of the picture because really you're driven by the politics. Right. So then if

anybody was growing maize wherever you just dropped off 30 or 300 tons of it, they're going out of business because now people can't wait to get rid of it. So your entire livelihood is now screwed. So give directly does the opposite, right? You're essentially saying, hey, what small business does your community need? We really need somebody who cuts hair because nobody really does it, and I love doing it, but I can't afford lights and a pair of shears in a chair. And so they spend the money on that, and then suddenly there's a local business that's buying from other local businesses. 100%. And the thing that's special about it is it's not give directly, going to the village and saying, hey, what business do you want to do? And then spending expensive money on consultants

and buying you, the shears for you and setting up the thing, By giving you the cash, it allows you to adjust in micro ways. Every house is different, every business is different, every need is different. If I think about your podcast, if I turned up and said to you, and remember in Africa, we're talking about a dollar is like $100 for people in extreme poverty because it's a much, much for a country. So it would be like coming to you in the podcast and saying, you've got two choices. Either I could give you $50,000 to invest in your business, or I could spend the $50,000 on a bunch of consultants coming in to tell you how to run your business. I'll take the cash.

You take the cash, right? Yeah. And I think this is the point from the villagers. They are just infuriated. So often I talk to them and they say, this lovely person came from Denmark and they taught us what fertilizers to use and what seeds to plant. And I'll say, oh, so are you doing it? And they're like, no, they spent all the money on teaching us.

They didn't give us any money to buy any seed or fertilizer. Right. So they have to just remember that for the next round of people that maybe leave. leave some of the seeds and fertilizer behind. It's so performative and some of it's unintentionally. So it is really, really sad. I was looking at give directly in where they operate, $650 plus million dollars directly into the hands

of over 1.4 million people living in poverty. So world's fastest growing nonprofit in Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Turkey, Uganda, Yemen, and the United States. I have to say, pretty interesting. you hear people escaping Congo, Rwanda, Yemen, and then it's like, oh, and Chicago. I suppose I could look out my window here in California and see why,

but that does stand out. What are you doing in the United States? We've done, I think, three main things in the United States. One is to respond to hurricanes and natural disasters. So, again, with a natural disaster in the United States, often what people really need is the cash to buy what they need. What they don't need is you turning up and saying, hey, I just did a gathered all my secondhand clothes at home and I've turned up and you can have my

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

to support people in extreme poverty. We're looking particularly at different segments. So we've supported particularly African American women. We're bringing together a project in Flint, Michigan, which you would have heard of because it had that great scandal around its water supply. I'm from Michigan. I'm very familiar with Flint. It's really, that whole thing is a shame.

And there's like two cops in the whole place and they're on their own and the water is undrinkable. And it's just, it's been forsaken for the last 30 plus years. Really a shame. 100%. We do do stuff in the US

and we're proud of what we do in the US. But the core of our work is still the extreme poor in Africa because the truth is that what we're trying to do in the US is build models and encourage the US government to do more of this stuff. Because in the end, the US government has more resources than we do. So we're piloting, we're developing models, we're showing what can be done, and we're hoping to change the sector in the US. But in Malawi,

what we're doing is directly changing individual lives. And what's amazing is that in Malawi, you really can transform someone's life with a gift of $550 or even less. Whereas in the US, that wouldn't have the same impact. Operating in the U.S., some people are saying, okay, fine, Jordan. Rory, tell me why I should help people outside the country when so many people inside my own country need help. You mentioned that $550 doesn't go as far, but what else? I mean, why should I help somebody in Malawi and not fund Flint, for example? I think it's really important to understand what extreme poverty means in Africa. When we talk about extreme poverty in the U.S. or the U.K., we're talking about people on maybe $30 a day.

When we're talking about extreme poverty in somewhere like Malawi, you're talking about people who are going to be lucky to be making $2 a day. I came across a grandmother looking after three grandchildren who got $3 cash a month, and she is at night getting a cooking pot with stones in it and putting that on the fire in the hope that the noise of the stones in the cooking pot are going to send the grandchildren to sleep when they're hungry. That's horrific.

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

I mean, it was one of my first sort of objections was I just can't believe it, that people don't waste it. Of course, change, any given change isn't necessarily guaranteed for a given program or a given individual. But a lot of the outcomes were really impressive. Lower HIV rates, lower child mortality, lower suicide rates, higher child growth, self-reported indicators of health, lower domestic or intimate partner violence, school attendance is up, stress is down, depressions down, deforestation is down. I mean,

there's all these sort of, I guess you would say knock-on effects, if that's used for good things as well as bad things, that tend to show up that we're surprising. Why is deforestation down, for example? That one kind of, I had to scratch my head there. Deforestation's down because there's less pressure. When people are very, very poor and they can't afford any basic cooking equipment, they will go into even national parks, even protected forests, and they will cut down those trees. Give them a little bit of income, raise them out of poverty a bit, and they are able to support themselves in other ways. And you will see it also with things like poaching. So it's about understanding, I guess, what you're pointing to, Jordan, is underneath all these things

is the question of poverty. And it turns out that all the other things we're talking about, health, education, your business, your shelter. These are just, in many, many cases, the number one thing that correlates with doing badly across the whole board is being poor. And having a little bit of money, just getting off that desperate destitute struggling to survive into a slightly more resilient space, giving you a chance to lift your head up. I was talking to a Kenyan man who's now working with us who I thought was very interesting.

He'd been working in the States. He was a student in the States. And he had been trying to pay his way through college doing three or four jobs at a time. And he said that one of the things he remembered, which was true about poverty in the U.S. and poverty in Kenya, is the sense that when you're really struggling, when you're in debt, when you can't meet any of your bills, when you're trying to hold down three, four jobs, you just have no space to think. you have no space to kind of lift your head and make any decisions about your future.

You're just trying to get through the day. And I think that's what hopefully this support can help people do. At the very, very least, those few hundred dollars allows somebody to live a slightly better life. And in many cases, it has an almost permanent impact on their life. We can see people who've received grants 12 years earlier still doing better than their control group because it's just given them enough of a leg up, get a little bit of livestock, invest a little bit in their business, so that when something hits, God forbid, COVID hits again,

they just have that much more resilience to make it through. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Rory Stewart. We'll be right back. Definitely support the fundraiser for this episode. All the sponsors are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals, but the fundraiser is at give directly.com slash Jordan. More info on that later and, of course, in the show close as well. Now for the rest of my conversation with Rory Stewart. I loved the economics of this, how the cash stimulates the local economy. So a dollar spent is a dollar earned by somebody else, of course. And in Kenya, it looks like there was a multiplier of 2.5x.

So for every $1,000 given to a household, the local economy grew by $2,500 with no, and I know people are going, but inflation with no serious inflation effects. This is like a dream come true for a free market economy fan, right? So instead of dragging the wheat from Idaho to Africa, you give somebody who buys the machinery to grow and harvest their own. He buys the gear, not an NGO buying it from a vendor at 150% markup because of logistics and red tape. Hiring people to grow it and harvest it, selling it locally.

I mean, it's really incredible. And it's how come, I hate asking these kinds of questions, but here we go. How come no one thought of this before or have they, and it's just phased resistance? I think the answer is that psychologically we liked the idea. of saving other people. We like the idea that we were in control. We liked the idea that we had knowledge that they didn't have.

We liked the idea that people were poor because they didn't have knowledge. And it was very uncomfortable for us to accept the possibility that somebody might be poor just because they didn't have any cash and that if they had a little bit of cash, they would be in a better situation.

I mean, it's not completely revolutionary because, of course, in a way, welfare programs in Europe or the United States do often acknowledge that if a mother has got children and can't support them, they need a bit of cash to get through the month. But I think what's different about this is understanding, not giving a small amount of money every month, which has a real problem on how you sustain it,

and a real problem about how somebody gets out of that situation, seeing the power, particularly with very poor communities in Africa, of giving a lump sum, which can really give someone, someone a chance, at least, to graduate out of poverty, a chance to get into a different economic level where they're not going to have to be that dependent on these things in the future. Right, okay, so monthly small payment,

not as good as lump sum that gets them to jump out of the pit, so to speak. Well, that's what we're trying to demonstrate. I mean, what we're hoping to do is really begin to demonstrate this at scale and why we're very excited at the idea of you working with a particular village and listeners getting involved is that we actually think that this could be taken

to a district level, ultimately even to a national, scale and that we might be able to in our lifetime end extreme poverty, that cash could be a really big driver. It's not the only thing. I mean, I want to emphasize, there are many other things that count. It helps if you've got a decent government. It helps if you've got some good roads and good schools and all that kind of good stuff. But to include the extreme poor in that story, to let the extreme poor benefit from that road, from that school, you've got to give them a little bit of cash to get going. And what we're hoping to demonstrate, if by some extraordinary reason, some incredible billionaire was listening to this program and wanted to write a check for $100 million,

they could take an entire district and demonstrate at an enormous scale what could be done. And then we could sell the story to the UN, to the US government, to others and say, stop the old model. We have now demonstrated at scale and we've documented it. We've done the right research, the right evidence, we've done the right randomized control tests. Here's the model, take it on. You hear that Zuckerberg? Time to put your money where your mouth is. Yeah, forget the VR thing. Come on, it's never going to happen. On the other hand, I mean, I was also thinking maybe he and Elon Musk when they do that boxing match in Vegas, maybe they could give the proceeds. Bring that up. Yeah. Yes, the proceeds go to get, we would love to have the proceeds go to give

directly. First of all, I would absolutely pay to see that because no matter who wins, we all win. because they're both going to get punched in the face, at least once, hopefully. You've never lived more vicariously than when you've seen Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both get punched in the face. That would be brilliant. And I just, I love the results, right?

I was looking, I scroll to give testimonials on the website of what people are doing with the money, which is very smart because it's less of that veneer of like, okay, the money goes here and then people do stuff with it. It's like you hear directly from the people who started a sewing shop, started a farm,

bought a motor taxi, started a repair shop for whatever cars or whatever it is, bicycles, food stands. And a recent study that I found on the website showed that refugees increased business ownership and increased earnings by over 60% after receiving cash aid, which is incredible. Because usually when you look at things like refugee situations, you just go, gosh, this is hopeless. They're all going to go on welfare immediately and drain on the state. and we just pity them and nothing more. And when you compare job training programs to simply giving cash, giving cash actually works better at improving entrepreneurship,

which really when you think about it is not a surprise, right? Because if you're an entrepreneur, you don't need job training as much as you need the ability to kick off your business. And I know that firsthand, just from my own life. I have a law degree. I didn't necessarily use it to start my business. I needed money, which I got from my law firm before they fired me. but they call it layoffs,

but we all know it really happened. I do have a question, though, what if you don't get cash and your neighbor does, right? I'd be kind of pissed if somebody came in, gave all my neighbors a thousand bucks or the equivalent of what, a hundred thousand bucks. And they were like,

sorry, Jordan, maybe you'll make the next round if we ever come back. How do you control for that? You're absolutely right. People, and this is true for any program, it doesn't matter whether you're giving someone weeds or you're supporting people to go to school,

people who don't get the support will be angry. Generally speaking, our answer to that is to do a whole village at a time. So we find villages that are in extreme poverty where we're confident that almost everybody in every house needs assistance. And then we will give assistance to every house. So you don't have that problem neighbor to neighbor. But you still have the problem potentially of the next door village. But in a way, that's inevitable. If you're doing good, and it's a sort of backhanded a compliment. I was discussing this with a colleague who said, but, you know, if you give one village a capacity building seminar, the other village isn't jealous that they didn't get it. But if you give one village cash, the other village is jealous. And I say, well, that's a kind of backhand

compliment to cash. The reason they're angry is that they can see that the cash makes a difference. That's a reason to do more cash, not less. Actually, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. I hadn't thought about that. I do have some figures that I'm going to go over in the show close about how the money gets there, what it does. I won't spend your time going over that, though, but for people that are interested in thinking about it, stick around for the show close, and I will go over it. It is psychological, right? It's not that people are selfish, I suppose, and this is even aid workers, it's just that if you have, I would imagine as an aid worker, it's tough to confront the fact that the local villagers have a better idea about what they need

than you do when your entire life has been spent in rural Africa, for example, other people what they need? 100%. It's a big threat. So I was the UK Secretary of State for International Development. I was responsible for a $20 billion a year budget. I had thousands of civil servants in embassies all over the world. And when people first proposed cash programs to us, when I first met the Michael Fay,

who's the co-founder of Give Directly, he brought this whole amazing initiative together, I felt deeply threatened. I thought, what are we going to do? All of us, all our civil servants, all our jobs. What happens? I mean, if it turns out that you're just going to give cash to someone, you know, how about me? I'm an agriculture expert. I'm a health expert.

I'm a, how about, you know, so you're absolutely right. There is something about this model, which is fundamentally threatening to a whole industry, but in a good way. How did you change your mind about this? Did you just look at the numbers and that persuaded you? I know you have a Rwanda story that I'm trying to tease out of you. Yeah. So Michael Faye, who was the co-founder, drove me out to Rwanda, out to a remote rural community.

And I walked into this woman's house. This is the woman I was describing with the three grandkids living on $3 cash a month. And I could not believe the poverty that she was living in. And I could not believe the difference that the cash was making. And back in the car, looking out of the window, I could see the difference between villages that had received give directly assistance and those that hadn't. You could just, you saw it in the tin roofs on the houses, you saw it in the latrines, but you smelled it most of all.

when you stepped out of the car, you could smell a lot of cow poo because the villagers that God give directly assistance, had bought cows, and they were able to manure their fields, and they were able to get milk for their children, and you could just tell immediately. People looked healthier, they were better fed, they were smiling more. It really is incredible, because in absolute terms, the amount of money is not that high.

I know villages range in size, but what would be the total loot drop so to speak, for a village that makes that big of a difference? So to make a difference to an individual's life, we aim to give about $550 to an adult individual. So that might be for a household, if there were two adults there, just over $1,000. And a village might be 100 houses,

so might be $100,000. And the point is that you can give at any level. The lovely thing about giving directly is, you know, my mother gives $30 a month. and she's put in direct touch with somebody and she gets updates on her $30 a month. And that makes a real difference to an individual's life.

And then if you're wealthier, you can give it a bigger level. You can give $100,000 and you can transform an entire village. And if you're Elon Musk, you could, if you wanted, lift an entire country out of poverty. That's really something.

I can't even imagine having that kind of power. By the way, where are you? Because I feel like I hear a call to prayer or something in the background. Am I imagining that? You know, you can hear the call to prayer. I'm talking to you from Amman in Jordan. Oh, okay.

You're talking to me just before the Muslim holiday of Eid. And so there's a lot of singing going on from the little minaret behind my house. It's very faint, but it's kind of unmistakable. Whenever you've, if you've spent one night in a country that has that, you will not forget it. Because the first time you hear it, I don't know about you, but I looked around and I was like, what the heck is that? And do I need to go to the airport right now? And at four in the morning, particularly. Yeah, exactly.

When I was in Egypt, I think one of the, the most confusing, sort of terrifying moments was I was in rural Egypt. I'd been there for a day. I woke up after a long trip getting there on a bus. I heard people screaming. And I mean, screaming, screaming, screaming, and I thought I've got, I'm furiously packing. And then I ran downstairs to see if I should just run out without my stuff. And it turned out to be a funeral. Have you ever said those funeral processions? Well, yes. I mean, the other thing that's very dramatic, which I don't know whether you've seen, but I saw in Pakistan and in Afghanistan is, and in Iraq, are these sheer processions where people strip their shirts off and they whip themselves with knives

for days. I mean, they can walk for us. I mean, it's, and you get thousands of often young men shirtless walking down the street with blood running down their backs, whipping themselves, nice. It's a very, very, you know, kind of strange, for them a very intense religious experience, but for you looking at it, a kind of very kind of uncanny, almost horrifying sight. Yeah, I've never seen. That's really, that's incredible, that's incredible, and they're literally a biohazard as well. I would imagine there's blood in the street after that. Yeah, there's a lot of blood in the street.

The funeral procession for people who are confused, they basically hold up a huge picture of the deceased, and the men are walking with it. I don't remember if the men were screaming, but the women are shrieking as if they are being stabbed, and it's just over and over and over, loud. wailing. But there's something quite cathartic about that, isn't it? I mean, I sometimes think that in our much more uptight cultures, we're missing something, that there's an immense emotional release there. And you often find that people grieve like that, these kind of formal screaming. You can see it in, as you say, many, many parts of Africa, including Egypt. But once they're through it, it's helping

to come to terms with the loss of someone they love. And maybe, you know, I feel particularly in Britain where we're very kind of stiff up a lip. We're missing out on something there. It's a funny point you make about Britain. I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, when I think unemotional, I kind of go with Germany, the UK, towards the top of my list for not really wanting to show your cards emotionally. The United States, we're all over the map, right?

You got your Latinas in California and they're just, you know, they're singing and dancing all over and you think it's a party, but they're just just another day at school or work. And then you've got your Asians, which is what my wife's family is. And it's like you can't, you couldn't pay them to showcase an emotion at a special look at. It's really, it really, really run the gamut. But you're right. That would be, that would be jarring. I can't even imagine the blood thing, though.

That's, that's like something out of the Spanish inquisition or something. I mean, it just reminds me of, isn't it a Catholic thing where they're doing the. Yeah, it's the flagellants. Yes. Yeah, it's directly related to that. You're right. Which people in Europe used to do during the plagues, they believe. that if they beat themselves enough, the black deaths would go away.

Man, the world is such a fascinating place. And by the way, for people who are confused about what the call to prayer is, which kicked off this whole tangent, and correct me, Roy, because I may butcher this, but those minarets, this giant things, those towers you see from the mosque, for those who don't know, there's loudspeakers in there, or a guy with a bullhorn, essentially, and they are singing, and that's where the sort of Allah Akbar, you know, and they do that, and they wake you up at 4 a.m.

And it's, is it five times a day? Yeah. People pray five times a day. And he will be saying in Arabic, God is great. There is no God but God. And Muhammad is his prophet. And peace be with you. And this will be coming out again and again and again.

It's actually quite moving because in many of the countries in which I've worked, almost everybody does pray five times a day. And you'll remember this. You'll see people just out on the street. I'll just unroll their prayer mat, do a little bit of praying, the shopkeeper, and then I'll roll it up again and go back into the house. And it's something that in Afghanistan, I felt even for the poorest, most remote community, they felt connected to the wider world through their religion.

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

Although I do, I'm about to go off on an 11-day silent retreat. I do these meditation retreats, which I did twice, in fact, in the United States in Western Massachusetts, slightly bizarre and kind of Buddhist retreats in Western Massachusetts. Those are trending right now. Do you know Yuvall, Noah, Ferrari Bonnie Chance? Seems like a guy. I do know him. He's someone I know of it. And I do it in his tradition. And in fact, he recommended these places that I go to.

I was going to say, you should connect with him because he does like two months of silence every year, which to me sounds, I'd rather be in prison. Javala is a level above me. He also doesn't have small children. I think my wife would have something to say if I went off on a 40-day silent retreat. Yeah, I'm going to New York for four days, and my wife is like, oh, my God, how am I going to deal with this? Can you come back a day early?

If I told her I was going on a 40-day silent retreat, she'd be like, you're not coming back, though, right? You're not coming back. Yeah, I think Yovos partners, very understanding. Yeah. Actually, he might really enjoy it too. I love my wife, but let's just say she could use a 40-day silent retreat or any kind of vacation for that matter.

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

anti-fraud costs, communicating with the villagers, because you can literally do a direct money payment. Yeah, you have quite a robust follow-up program, if you will. It's like, okay, here's the money, are you qualified for the money, here's the money, here's the rest of the money. Did the money work? Do you have issues? Do you have questions? And it's like multiple, multiple times as opposed to a box of cash on your doorstep, which I think is really smart. People are going to say, this sounds like a pilot for universal basic income, UBI. What do you think about? that. It seems like this is the nascent beginning of something

that could look like that across the whole globe. I think there are people who are enthusiasts for universal basic income who can take this as a way of us demonstrating how the model works, how it's done. But our beginning here with this project

is not to focus on basic income every month. It's to focus on a one-time transfer to try to lift people up because I think we're not yet in a world. in which it's realistic to expect people from Global North to pay every month to support the income of people in the Global South. And I think there are reasonable questions to ask about dependency

and whether that's sustainable. So yes, absolutely. We're demonstrating the technology and the mechanisms for doing universal basic income. But actually what we're doing is a little bit different. What we're doing is transforming people's lives through a single donation where we make it clear that this isn't something that they're going to be getting

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

And one of the sad things is the world is getting more dangerous all the time. My mother took a land rover from London to Kuala Lumpur in 1963. She drove right across Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, you know, all the way. Wow. Through Myanmar, through Burma. and by the time I started walking, there were bits of that you couldn't do anymore. And now for somebody listening who's 20 years younger than me, there's even more of it that you can't do. It's very sad in many ways

as we get more prosperous, as we get more wealthy in the north, many parts of the world are actually unfortunately stuck than getting poorer and more dangerous all the time. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if you could walk, depending on your citizenship, you might not even be able to walk across Russia right now. Right.

And if you did, you'd have to carry money. You mentioned that it doesn't matter how much money you carry with you. How much money were you carrying with you? I got him dying to know. So I would carry about $5,000, which would be enough to get me across. Where did you keep it? I kept it in a money belt in the front of my trousers, and I'd pull my trousers over the top of it. That's it.

Oh, it was all in one place? I was thought you were going to tell me you had it taped all to your body or something. No, the little bits. I'd have little bits hidden in the top of my backpack, little bits in the soles of my boots, just in case they took the money belt, yeah. but the main thing was around my waist here. So adventures in your DNA, I mean, if your mother did that in the 60s, that's really something. Why did she do that? That's highly unusual.

For the same reason, Jordan, that you do all your trips, I think largely for the adventure. Indeed. Well, I see that you're sitting in the dark. I realize how late it is over there in Jordan. Thank you so much. This is fascinating, and I hope to have you on again sometime. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with Danny Trejo. An ex-con turned icon featured in over 350 films and TV shows. You've seen them everywhere. In machete, Breaking Bad, Desperado, and much, much more.

He's never been through acting school, which doesn't matter when you're a legend slash icon. Before becoming such a prolific star, Danny Trejo was a drug-addicted criminal, hooked on heroin at age 12, who spent more than a decade in and out of prisons. Here's a quick preview. Once you start doing robberies and you're using heroin, the robberies become addicted. You don't know whether you're doing robberies to support your drug habit or doing drugs to support your robbery habit. I read you robbed a store with a hand grenade. This was later on. This was like we did a robbery and we ended up with this hangarade.

So I tried it and it was very simple. You know, when you hold a hang grenade and you got your hand on the pin and you ask somebody for some money, They think twice. Prison, there's only two kinds of people in prison. There's predators and they're prey. That's it. And you've got to decide every damn morning, what are you going to be? And I know a lot of people that decide I'm brave.

I don't care because I'm tired. I know a lot of people that took an elevator off the fifth tier. There's no elevator. I know a lot of people that cut their wrists. I've seen guys with all the muscles in the world get stabbed by a short Mexican, in tennis shoes with a big knife. and fighting, I don't fight you. That's prison.

Prison has a taste. Put one of those fake pennies, the lead one in your mouth and keep it there. That's the taste of pressure. That's the taste of anxiety. That's the taste of fear. That's the taste of everything. You feel it.

That's what you walk around with. And when you finally lose that taste, you've decided whether you're going to be predator prey. That's the only way you can lose it. For more, including how Danny Trejo walked onto a Hollywood movie set as a drug counselor and left as a bona fide actor, and how Danny Trejo has managed sobriety for over 50 years and continues to help others maintain theirs. Check out episode 398 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. I told you this was such a fascinating, dude, fascinating conversation.

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

this stuff works. It's not just aid. Of course, we all have problems with aid. I've done whole episodes on why aid is more harm than good. This is different. My episodes on aid, 794 and 795, these types of results, they don't mean that people living in poverty are always going to be the best at deciding how money should be used.

But it does raise the question why we've been trusting the vast majority of our giving to an aid industry with a very patchy track record of allocating capital. So 794 and 795, we'll link to those in the show notes. But more importantly, we are going to be helping out that village in Kenya. And I cannot wait. I think this is such a cool opportunity. As I mentioned during the show, starting today and continuing until September 15th, we are on a mission to lift an entire village in Kenya out of extreme poverty by delivering

cash donations with no strings attached. A kind-hearted donor, they're going to double every donation that we received during our campaign. So we're trying to hit 20 grand, which I think we're going to do quite easily. Well, I hope so. with your help, it'll magically transform into 40 grand, bringing hope to families that struggle to afford even the most basic necessities of life.

Give Directly is proud to be the first NGO extending any real supportive hand towards the inhabitants of Namani. Now, this is a rural Kenyan village. The goal is to gift $1,000 each to all 36 families. It's 187 people residing in the village, which is as remote as it gets. So this is how bad things are,

how dire things are in this village. Seven families. seven out of all 36 have a shelter, a permanent shelter. The rest of the folks are just kind of all over the place or in temporary shelters made out of natural materials. Education is $3 a semester, but over 51% of residents do not have schooling because they can't afford it, which is just horrible. Medical care is often out of reach.

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

capable of enduring the droughts that they're in all the time. They're going to improve their homes, metal roofs, concrete floors, so they're not sleeping in the mud and dealing with that. And they're going to launch businesses, community taxi services, getting motorcycles so they can transport folks around mobile phones so people can keep in touch and do business with other villages. Really going to be an amazing opportunity here. I can't wait to see the power of what this does. Go to give directly.com slash Jordan to donate. Of course, I'm donating.

I would love to hit this goal, smash it, and keep on going or do this again for another village. Donations are 100% tax deductible in the U.S. For those listeners, not in the U.S., here's your chance to support the show. I know you always say, oh, I can't really support your sponsors. What do I do? Go to give directly.com slash Jordan. And if you send me a screenshot of your donation,

I will happily send you a personalized video thanking you because this is a cool freaking project. And I can't wait to smash this goal with your support. All things, Rory Stewart will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot transcripts in the show notes. Of course, our sponsors are always on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals, but please definitely check out our fundraising. at give directly.com slash Jordan.

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