I'm Tom Viliu and this is Impact Theory. Let's dive right back in to part two with Rory Stewart. It's talking to me about social media. So, practically speaking, there is a collision.
As an American, it certainly seems true. As an outsider looking at the UK, it seems even more true. As an outsider looking at Canada, it's downright terrifying. What do you think should be done with social media?
Should people barring a direct incitement to violence? Should there be controls? Should the platforms be held accountable to what people publish on their platforms? What's your take on that?
I don't know. I mean, it's a very, very difficult world to get into this. A part of the problem is there is so much money involved. Literally, some of the very, very wealthiest companies in the world are on one side of this debate.
And their entire business model is predicated on these algorithms and on this particular way. I mean, what's striking is that, and I'm being a bit provocative here towards you and many of your listeners, but what's striking is that some of these companies, my sense is Google began quite idealistic. There was all this do-no-evil stuff going on. And back in 2014, it still seemed plausible to me that these companies believe they had an ethical purpose.
It feels to me as though the only thing they care about now is profit. And they have developed these unbelievable marketplaces, advertising models, algorithms that allow them often to take $0.80 in the dollar from an entire industry. Now, to what extent can they then be trusted, really, to think clearly about these things? I just had a, you know, I just had a long conversation with a guy called Nick Clegg, who's very senior at Facebook.
And I like Nick very much, but can I really believe when he's earning as much money as he is that he's going to be clear and honest with himself? I didn't think he's necessarily lying to me. He may be lying to himself about the negative impacts of what's going on. So I don't know how you get through this, but one thing I know for sure, these algorithms are not sharing information on the basis of what they believe is true.
They're sharing information on the basis of what gets attention, which they can then sell to a company that wants your attention in order for you to buy their products. And do you think about X? Sorry, go ahead. No, no, go with that.
We're just going to ask, what do you think about X's community notes? Step in the right direction, fine. If anybody pays any attention to them, but often the community notes come when the damage is done. I mean, Elon Musk had got 45 million people viewing a post claiming that Kiyastama was trying to extradite people to a small island in the South Atlantic before any community notes get on.
I mean, why did Donald Trump just produce him this debate, this strange story about immigrants eating cats? Because he operates in a strange bubble full of other people who believe this. Why do they believe this? Well, they believe it because it's incredibly easy now to share this kind of information.
When he said it, I guess millions of people listening will have been like downright because they somehow have seen the stuff and he's seen the stuff. But these algorithms are not acting responsibly. I mean, they're not attempting in any way. I mean, Elon Musk is a very interesting example of this.
You would have thought that as the owner of this company, he would bother sometimes to check what he puts out. The fact that he can't be bothered to spend a little bit of time checking whether the article he's sharing is true or not, checking whether or not the historian he's endorsing has said that Adolf Hitler was in favor of peace and Winston Churchill was the worst walk around the world. I mean, what's going on? It's this, I think, that's bringing it to a head that previously, if you were a regulator in Europe or Canada dealing with these companies, you could convince yourself that they were well intentioned and that when they got things wrong, it was by mistake.
So the model was predicated on the idea that you would go to Facebook or go to Twitter and say, I'm sorry, you've posted something dangerous or untrue and rely on them to take it down. But we're now dealing with a situation where it feels as though I'm afraid that Elon Musk that he's not well intentioned in that way, that he's testing it, he's pushing the boundary as hard as he possibly can, and that you're not going to have a very productive conversation with him saying, I'm sorry, what she just said was completely untrue, unbelievably dangerous, causing huge chaos on the streets. Could you please take it down? The likelihood is he'll say, no, that's my free speech, I'm allowed to share lies if I want.
And that changes the whole equation. In what way? Well, because if 44 million people suddenly hear that, for example, I mean, how did these riots start in Britain? The riots started in Britain because a post on social media claimed that a Syrian immigrant, who was named, got off a boat in the last 12 months and killed three young girls with a knife.
This was completely untrue. The girls were killed by a Christian who'd been born in the United Kingdom. Immediately, people are burning down mosques and they're burning down mosques because they believe it was done by a Muslim. And then being spread very rapidly around social media is details on other mosques and other community centers and other asylum seekers.
And quite quickly, the government begins to lose control of the narrative. Then if other people are tweeting out, you know, the government is trying to crush you and they're going to take you off to the South Atlantic and put you on an island in the middle of nowhere, right? More and more people come out on the streets, fighting against what they believe is this kind of crazy repressive government that's going to deport them from the country. So I mean, that was a very obvious example to us a few weeks ago, where lies spread on social media quite literally led to asylum seekers trapped in a burning hotel with hundreds of people outside trying to set light to it on the belief that these people were somehow responsible for stabbing young women who they hadn't sat.
So your own countryman Orwell was very aware that there was always going to be a battle for the truth and that humans could be manipulated pretty easily with fear being one of the greatest weapons. That is where I start to get worried because it social media forces us to confront some really stark base assumptions. So for instance, can the populace think for itself? If you don't think that the average person at large can parse through the information that's coming at them, then it's like, we have to shut this down for the good of the people.
If you believe that someone somewhere, when you put that kind of control on is going to have to decide what is true and that they are likely to become corrupted by power, if nothing else, you run into a situation where you have trade-offs before you and you are simply choosing the lesser of the bad trade-offs. Does it not seem that way to you? I think where we probably disagree is I think you're imagining a little bit like your mob against authoritarian rule, you're imagining two extremes and you've lost sight of the reality. The reality is that each of us, including you and me, are fallible humans.
We often will end up believing things that aren't true and you and I will be quite proud of our ability to parse information and judge, but we'll be aware that we've got it wrong. We've been wrong about friends, we've been wrong about world events. We're susceptible to certain kinds of authority. Our memories are very weird and flawed.
We are strange creatures and so I don't think one wants to, and I'm very sensitive to this as somebody who was an elected politician and obviously is an elected politician. It would be a complete career suicide to suggest that the public could ever be wrong about anything because your opponent would immediately say, you know, you're contemptuous, the public, you don't believe in democracy. My view is that generally the judgment of the public is pretty good, it's generally why I like living in a democracy. I think people are pretty sensible.
Do I think that the decision to vote for Brexit was the correct decision? No, I think it's been very damaging for the United Kingdom, but the majority of people voted for it. How do I then deal with that? I deal with that by saying to myself, well, we live in a society where there's lots of different access to information, lots of different levels of education, lots of different data out there, and it's a pluralistic society and people have the right to choose to leave the European Union if they want to, even if I disagree with them.
But that's about defining a terrain of rules. It's defining a stadium within whose bounds you play. People can choose within that stadium to leave the European Union. They can choose to put taxes up or taxes down.
They cannot, in my view, choose to burn down hotels with human beings in them. Our whole system is about drawing boundaries and lines, and the risk of where the real techno-optimists and apostles of social media are going is that they're forgetting how many rules there are already in our societies, how our whole society depends on rules, and they're asking for exemption for the rules for one particular form, forgetting that our entire lives of liberty and happiness depend upon systems that constrain in innumerable ways what we can do. Okay, so I think we actually agree on all of the pieces, but we disagree maybe on the conclusion. So we're fallible.
So my whole worldview is predicated on my agreement with the following statement. So it's interesting that I think there is some area that where we end up drawing something different. So we're fallible 100%. That is why I am so terrified of the government because an authoritarian government is a government that says we know best.
And I'm saying, no, no, no, you're just made up of fallible people who believe things that aren't true, who have memories that are just wildly manipulated by themselves, by others. It's the way that our minds work is utterly fascinating. So all of those things that make us a slightly scary creature, I agree with all of that. And I come back to and I suppose the question that I asked about community notes is because that to me feels like the only real solution.
So I get it, there are going to be times where 45 million people 100 million people 200 million whatever, they see a lie, a blatant lie. And that will do just unimaginable damage before it's corrected. But and I have not been able to articulate to you in this that I look at the two extremes. So that I can find the third way.
I'm just trying to see what the realities of the compromise are. Not because I'm saying, oh, you just go to one of the other. I'm saying, if you understand what the trade-offs are going to be, hopefully you can find a better way. But when I look at, okay, millions, hundreds of millions of people will see a lie and that lie could have tremendous consequences.
So what do I do about that? Do I step on that from the top down or do I let the people battle that out in the arena of ideas? I think I was pretty agnostic until COVID happened. And all of a sudden I saw people that had very credible voices in terms of epidemiology being told to shut up because what they were saying did match the narrative.
And if you believe in the scientific process as I do, you break that process. And so you are breaking the ability to make progress when you tell people that certain things are beyond the pale and cannot be discussed. There are certainly things beyond the pale that you can't do. But in terms of like, hey, here's my hypothesis on what is happening here.
Again, I'm not saying that you should be able to advocate for violence or anything like that. I'm just saying we, when authoritarian rule comes in to say misinformation, disinformation, mal-information, those are all completely off limits, you get a totalitarian state. So I mean, I, you know, I agree and sympathize a lot of what you're saying. I mean, my version of your experience during COVID was my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So I served in those places. And I saw very, very clearly people pursuing completely crazy policies that made no sense at all. And I saw politicians and generals and an enormous amount of the public getting behind projects, which were just simply crazy, wasting lives, wasting money. I mean, just, and so it's very easy on the basis of that to think the establishment, the elites got no idea what it's doing.
And we need to blow up the whole system. The question is, what is the alternative? And I don't think that what we're describing with COVID or Iraq and Afghanistan, or indeed what I saw as somebody working in international development, where I saw so many ludicrous, stupid, wasteful projects. I don't think those things are examples of authoritarian rule.
It can feel like it, because if you disagree with the conventional wisdom, it can feel pretty authoritarian. But it's much more like what happens if you're in a company where the board has got the wrong end of the stick. These are much more, the problems we face in our societies are much more about optimism bias, groupthink, risk aversion. So if I think about what's happening with COVID in the United Kingdom, it's not exactly that we're living in a dictatorship.
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The economic policy 1980s was pretty ludicrous. And that a lot of the things we've done and believe in the privilege was I happen to believe that there's a form of this group think an optimist bias happening with social media that in 20 years time, people are going to look at it and they're going to look at it in the way that they look at Philip Morris cigarettes or purgy farmer. They're going to literally say, what were these people thinking? How did they think this was normal and okay?
But this isn't authoritarianism. This is this is group think it's optimism bias, it's financial interests. It's and that's and the way to deal with it is not through the radical opening of every narrative. The way to deal with it is through checks and balances.
The way to deal with it is through an independent judiciary, through independent universities, through electoral cycles where people can get rid of their government every four years, through breaks between executives and legislators. I'm much more confident that the answer is the structures of liberal democracy, not the kind of that we're going to stop authoritarianism by unleashing a power of social media. I think the power of social media is much more likely to lead to the collapse of liberal democracies and the development of authoritarian states. It's much more likely to embolden populace and much more likely to embolden people who are able to exploit attention and advertising models to take power and then challenge the constitution.
Very interesting. If I'm right that that only happens when the tinder is dry, meaning the economics are bad. There's an underlying sense of frustration. Yes, I can see that, but I think that's just you're supercharging the the voices to your point.
But if the voices have nothing to rally in the populace's soul, I don't think it will take hold when things are growing and people feel good. You just don't end up going down that path. But my answer to that is I'm more gloomy than you are. I think it's very rare in societies for things to be growing and for people to be feeling good.
Our experience as humans is one of perpetual dissatisfaction. I mean, what are we meaning when we're saying things are going well? If you're somebody on a low income in the United States, you now live in a world in which even if your income was going up by 10% a year, you're still getting by on 40, $50,000 a year and you can see on television, people living lives where they don't have to worry about their mortgage. They don't have to worry about facing their grocery bills.
You're stuck in Flint, Michigan and you can see the Kardashians having a good time in California. We cannot, as societies, produce a situation where everybody or even the majority of people are going to feel that their lives are great. People are always going to be incredibly conscious of the injustice of the world, the unfairness of life. Most people will always feel that.
And therefore, we need to design systems which are realistic about that, which find ways of explaining that in the United Kingdom that we can't pay for our health service without paying much more tax, that we can't expect to clean up our rivers without investing far more in our water system, that we're not going to be able to have an economy that grows as fast as China, that we're not going to be able to run our hospitals without having immigrants. And the Tinder will always be there. All societies are full of time. There may be rare exceptions.
It's possible that in the United States between about 1955 and 1975, you had a rare period of 20 years where the Tinder was a little wetter and where people were not as enraged. But the general condition of most of our societies, doesn't matter whether you're in China or Indonesia or Britain or the United States, is a lot of very angry people, understandably, because life is extremely unfair. That is certainly a sobering perspective. So, if we are living in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, the Tinder is always there.
Social media gives voices that create this rise in populism. What do we actually do? Well, I think we have to up the quality of the non-populist politicians. They need to have policies which are credible and serious.
They need to be able to improve people's lives. And they're never going to be able to deliver everything that people crave. But we certainly should be able to deliver better health care to people in the United States. We should be able to deliver better infrastructure.
We should be able to deliver decent economic growth, not Chinese-style economic growth, but we should be able to deliver to a certain economic growth. And we should be able to have more equal tax systems. These things are not beyond us. Secondly, I think we need much better communication.
I think one of the problems is that the Hillary Clinton's of this world came across as humanless and stiff and out of touch. And if the center is to regain a bit of momentum, it needs to develop a sense of humor. But finally, we need a sense of moral purpose. We need to explain why the populist critique is not just intellectually incoherent, but morally wrong.
Why pluralism matters, why democracy matters, why equality matters, why these things suppress us ethically. So that's on the side of the politicians. But then I think there is probably also room for more regulation and social media as part of the story. All right.
I see, and this is a very classic view, but I see all of history, all of human existence as a feedback loop, and quite frankly, a positive feedback loop so that the output of the system itself causes the system to move faster. And when I look at the economy, I don't know if you know about Ray Dalio, but looking at his study of empires rising and empires falling, and it's all essentially a cycle of debt, there seems an inevitability. I know you and I slightly disagree about, although I will say in your answer, it sounded to me like a lot of things that you're saying that we need to do better politicians, better economy, more humor. These are all things that put a little moisture on the tinder.
And I think that's right. I think that's the right answer. But it does get at, I think my stance, which is, okay, the tinder is always going to be there, but it does differ in degree of dryness. And so there are times where it's more likely to spark than others.
So, I think the debt cycle drives a lot of this, and that we are now, obviously, the UK is an empire that has, I mean, I would say it has collapsed, certainly. It is not what it was when the sun is set on the British Empire, and the American Empire feels like, to use Ray Dalio's language, we are mid to late stage five, and stage six is total collapse. In this moment, do you perceive any inevitability? Because that is certainly how it feels, from my perspective.
Well, it depends, it depends which, I mean, I think you're right that debt is a big problem, and we don't talk enough about debt, and we don't talk enough about the way that money works, and we don't talk about what happens when debt is cancelled or forgiven, and what that can mean for countries too. But it also depends when you talk about the collapse of empires, what you mean, and what you're worried about. So, the United Kingdom no longer rules an empire, it's a small island in the Mediterranean, sorry, it's all under the Atlantic, I don't know why I put it. I was like, wow, you guys upgraded to the Mediterranean.
It must be the weather here. It's climate change, make us see more Mediterranean. But the average person in Britain is much better off than their grandparents were. So, at the period where Britain ruled a quarter of the world, life expectancy was in its early 60s, average incomes were down at five or six thousand pounds a year, people didn't have indoor lavatories and indoor toilets, they didn't have electricity, many people, and now we live in a world in which we no longer get to send white guys off to rule large chunks of India.
But the average person in the United Kingdom is far better off materially than they were in the 1930s, 1940s. So, what are we talking about when we're talking about the collapse of the American empire? Perfectly plausible that within 2030 years time, nobody in the Congo is going to be interested in what the United States has to say about the world. Perfectly plausible that nobody in Japan or South Korea is going to rely on the United States but that doesn't mean that the next generation or the generation after might not live lives which are longer, happier, more fulfilled and richer than those of us that are alive today.
The only thing that I lose sleepover is that the transition moment is almost always devastating. So, the long arc of history, it won't matter, it'll bend towards justice, things will get better for everybody, but that will be cold comfort to the people that have to live through it. But setting that aside, because there's some other things that I want to talk to you about, decentralization, being one of them, this is something you've put forward as a way to improve politics, to get out of some of the Quagmire and then your recent work on direct giving, I think these two ideas are really powerful. Well, let me talk about them and they're related in a way.
So, decentralization is about understanding that often local people know more, care more, can do more than distant officials, that you're much more likely to come up with a good solution for your neighborhood than somebody in Washington. And that there's another great benefit for decentralization, getting power down to a local level, which is that you can end up with a lot more innovation. You can learn from each other rather than having a single centralized structure, different states do different things and they learn from each other, compete with each other. I also think that at a time when we've lost faith in democracy, the closer you put government to people, allowing them to vote in their local area and get engaged in shaping their local area, the more faith and trust they redevelop in the democratic system.
I think our societies are basically too big, our governments are too far away and that a lot of our problems come from that. The same would be true with industrial strategies. I think that an industrial strategy for California is much better developed in California than Washington. And probably much better developed in Northern California than in California as a whole, et cetera.
On direct giving, I mean, this is something which is even more radical, but I used to run a $20 billion a year international development program. I'm literally giving $20,000 million a year to people in developing world. It's one of the largest development programs in the world. And we achieved so little.
And one of the reasons we achieved so little is that we were obsessed with the idea that we knew best. We were coming into an African village and we were going to teach them something. We had this great phrase, give someone a fish they eat for a day, teach them to fish they eat for a lifetime. And we developed these mad teaching people to fish programs, which ended up consuming 95% of the budgets and ending up with almost no good results on the ground.
I then had the privilege a few years ago visiting this non-profit called Give Directly, which was giving cash. It's all it was doing, turning up in a village. It was serving people, and then it was transferring to their phones, cheap feature phone, about $900 in cash. You go back a few weeks later, the entire community is transformed.
People have new roofs, their kids from school, their eating better, this electricity, this water supply, this latrines. The whole place has been completely transformed and transformed for, I would say, about 5% of the costs that it would take you to do it through a traditional program was you could do 20 times as many villages as you could do through a traditional program. And why? Well, because it turns out the cash falls like a kind of water on a mountain landscape.
It fills every crevice and cranny, and it adjusts flexibly to different people's lives. It adjusts the fact that you may have a different business idea to me, or your neighbor may be focused on health care and someone else focused on educational. You may need to fix your roof. I already fixed my roof.
I want to buy a cow. You want to get a bicycle for your business. And the cash allows you to do that, whereas the traditional program comes in and says, the one thing that matters in this village is water, or the one thing that matters in this village is educational, the one thing that matters in this village is a road, or the one thing that matters is roofs, or the one thing that matters is sanitation. It's nonsense.
Every house is different. Every need is different. And if you give cash, something very interesting happens. People begin adjusting to each other.
You and your neighbors buy a bunch of bicycles so you can take a product's market. I open a store fixing bicycles. You buy cow. I open a store selling veterinary medicine for cows, or I set up a yogurt business processing the milk from those cows.
There's amazing multiplier effects that come out of cash. And above all, I think, just to finish on that, it gives dignity. It's saying that the poorest people in the world know more than you or I do about the village in Malawi. The idea that you or I have any idea what their lives are like, what their needs are, what their priorities are.
It's just madness. We can begin to understand what they're worried about day to day. And it would cost us an incredible amount of money trying to work it out. Most of which would be wasted.
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It's going to sound weird, but it's basically a decentralized bank that is creating money out of thin air from their perspective. It just shows up in their bank account. We're creating money, we're distributing it. Given that that must always happen to jumpstart an economy, whether you're digging gold out of the ground or you're harvesting seashells or salt or whatever, you have to create a thing that is the money that people want, and therefore they will do a thing.
It allows people to specialize. I mean, this just is how economies are born. But the economy must become, at some point, self-sustaining, or you get what we're having here in America, which is why I think we're in so much trouble, which you're just printing money. But setting that aside, how does this, how does direct giving, if you look at it like that, jump-starting an economy, how does it become self-sustaining?
Well, one thing is that what we're increasingly doing is giving one-time payments. This is not a UBI, so people are not receiving this money every month. It's a one-time capital investment that is going into getting that business off the ground or fixing that roof. And it's understanding, as you say, that often what's holding people back is capital, not knowledge.
The people in this village have a very good idea what goods they can sell in the market town. The problem is they're 20 miles away from the market town, and they don't have a bicycle to get to it. Or they just don't have a plastic bottle into which to put the yogurt that they're milking out of the cow. I mean, there's very simple things that they're often lacking.
So it's recognizing that you're running a little shop in town. You don't have any money to buy any biscuits. These are pretty straightforward things. Or you can't buy bulk.
A lot of the issues is that one of the reasons the extreme poor in Africa end up in a very bad position is that they can't buy a packet of 12 bits of toilet paper. They have to buy in tiny, more expensive quantities because they don't have the money to do any kind of bulk buying. There's no economies to scale for them. Once that's going, then, of course, it isn't about cash.
Once the motorly economy for the extreme poor is going, it's then much more about the economy as a whole. It's about, is the release of government? Where's the tax rate? Where's the infrastructure?
Are the roads? Are the schools? Are the clinics? What's your tariff and trading position?
So the cash is not about kickstarting the whole economy. It's about allowing the extreme poor and even within a country, as poor as Rwanda, we're talking about a third of the population, not the majority of the population, allowing them to access the infrastructure and the economy that's out there. Interesting. You said this is not about jumpstarting the whole economy.
I'm very surprised. You say that, meaning there's already an economy there or... Yeah, so let's take Rwanda. Rwanda has got a grist domestic product of about $10 billion a year.
And the extreme poor are living on about $2 a day. And there's probably about, say, two million of them in that country. What you're talking about is giving the money to the people who are literally struggling to work out how they're going to eat for the next two days and allowing them to access services which often already exist. There's often already a hospital or a clinic, but if you are on the edge of starvation, you just can't get to that hospital clinic.
They make your school, but you just can't afford to send your kids to that school because the basic money that you might even need to buy a textbook or the decision that your child's not going to be hoeing vegetables but go after school is too much for you to make. Again, Rwanda, it's got an insurance sector. It's got call centers. It's got software developers.
It's got people employed as teachers and doctors and there's lots of stuff happening in the economy. The problem is these remote villages. And that's where the $900 suddenly transforms somebody's opportunities and ability to better themselves. Okay, so what is it?
Just not to pick on Rwanda, but since you brought them up, why doesn't Rwanda do this themselves? Is there corruption in the system? Is there something broken? Like why didn't this problem resolve itself?
Well, fundamentally, because the country hasn't got enough money. I mean, even with the GDP of $10 billion, it's got a population of about 10 million people. They're living on the average person is living on about $1,000 a year. And the tax revenue that you can generate from that is not sufficient to be able to deliver $900 to a family and extreme property.
You would need to bring in the money from the World Bank or the IMF or some other donor. And it's not alone. You're giving people. They're not paying you back.
It's a one-time cash corrupt. So without the taxation revenue, without the ability to borrow, you simply don't have the money to give these people. Okay, so is this just trying to find an analogy to help people wrap their heads around this? And I'm asking this in the spirit of the following.
I don't think the average taxpayer cares. So they're like, why am I going to pay for this? Like, if the Rwandan government isn't able to do this for their own people, why am I doing this? And so then it becomes a humanitarian thing.
And I think people will get some people, obviously. We'll get behind like, okay, cool. I'm willing to do this. But they're going to need to really understand how this at some point becomes self-sustaining.
So the Rwandan government is already not collecting enough taxes to be able to do this with their own populace. And this isn't jumpstarting the whole economy, but attaching them to the economy, does that make this all work? Or are we going to have a brief generation where things are nice and then it just falls by the way? No, I mean, one of the reasons why we're quite confident about this is that some very, very rigorous randomized control trials have been run where you compare the groups that receive the cash with the groups that don't receive the cash over 3, 6, 9, 12 years.
And we're seeing even 12 years into these programs, the sustained impact of a few hundred dollars given 12 years earlier in terms of people savings, their investments and above all their incomes. And you're seeing those people becoming taxpayers and you're seeing those people contributing in a productive fashion to the economy. So the evidence is very, very striking in a study in Kenya. For each dollar going into these villages, there's $2.50 a benefit for the surrounding area.
This is partly because people starting from very low base. It's not. I think you were getting at this a few minutes ago. Capital in this context goes much, much further than it would in some of the United States, partly because things much cheaper, partly because what is a dollar for us will end up being worth about $100 for the people receiving it.
But also that there is so much untapped potential, so much untapped labor, so much untapped resource. You know, there's quite literally in Zambia, there is, I was with a farmer in Zambia. And he said, I just got a house to my son and I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, well, come with me.
And literally, he just walked into the bush, chopped down some trees and stuck up a mutting. Now his son was cultivating what was wasteland and still an enormous amount of this incredible land there, which hasn't even begun to be cultivated. So the small amount of money that you bring in, which allows somebody to get that home by a few seeds, get a little bit of fertilizer pesticide plant a few trees, produces impact in a way that it never could if you were giving the money to somewhere in Kansas, where it's much more difficult for somebody in extreme poverty to put their money to work. If you guys have 12 years worth of data on this, where can people learn about that?
So if you go to GiveDirectly.org, they're fantastic. And I think very honest, and one of the reasons I support this organization, I'm not paid by this organization, but I support this organization is because they're wonderfully honest. And they've got a lot of research, they talk very openly about things that go wrong. They talk about when they're surprised by less impact, they talk about when they're disappointed, but they also talk beautifully about the things that have worked and how much they've learned.
And they show right the way down to the detail, these academic papers, there'll be more than 350 studies now. And these are rigorous models on the way in which you do a medical trial, in the way that you compare the control group and the treatment group. How does this compare to what Bill Gates is doing? He is doing something very different.
Bill Gates is concerned with health, and what he really wants to do in many contexts is eliminate diseases. So he would like to eradicate polio. He'd like to end malaria, for example. He'd like to vaccinate people.
And that really is what he cares about. If I'm looking at somebody in a village house and you give them cash, they get to choose what their priority is. Am I going to fix my roof? Am I going to start a business?
Am I going to put my kids in school? Am I going to vaccinate myself? That's not the bill gets you. Bill gets you as this person should vaccinate themselves.
The money is going into vaccination. And my problem with that, that I'm not succeeding in convincing Bill Gates this, and this just irritated me if he listens to a show, is that what you're often doing is letting people live longer lives in extreme grinding poverty. You're not giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. They're just living longer.
Now, there's something to be said for living longer, but I'm not sure that the weight that he puts on living longer as opposed to living a shorter life in better material conditions is correct. Roy, talking to you has been utterly fascinating, man. I cannot thank you enough for your time. Where can people follow along with you?
Well, thank you. So a couple of things. I do go to the Give Directly website because I'm passionately proud of them. I twist Rory Stewart UK, and I've just written a book on politics, which is down in US called How Not to Be a Politician.
I love it. Awesome. Thank you again so much for joining me today. Everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe.
And until next time, my friends, be a legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress.
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