Americans are an incredibly generous people

Danny Crichton:

Maany, thank you so much for joining us.

Maany Peyvan:

My pleasure, Danny. Thanks for having me.

Danny Crichton:

So you come here under, I would guess, dark clouds because you're coming from us from the United States Agency for International Development, a program that has been around for decades, kind of dates back to John F. Kennedy, but really kind of the founding of the country, which is the assistance of foreign nations who are allies or partners of us over a long period of time. And as you know over the last couple of weeks, USAID has really entered the American imagination in a very negative way under the Trump administration, and you were directly affected by that. So I just want to start it from the top of the show talking about your personal experience. You worked there, you're a very senior executive. What has happened to the agency has really affected you, and so I wanted to just talk about your personal story and go from there.

Maany Peyvan:

Yeah, thank you Danny. Well, you're absolutely right. It is personal. I have worked at USAID twice now across two democratic administrations, during the Obama administration and then again under President Biden. I served under two amazing what we call administrators, the people who run the agency. One was Dr. Rajiv Shah, who now runs the Rockefeller Foundation. The other is Ambassador Samantha Power. I have seen an arc of both the work of the agency and the incredible impact it's had in places all around the world, but I've also seen an arc of the place that foreign aid and the good we do around the world as Americans, the place that holds in the culture and the place that holds in the imagination of Americans.

You said something about USAID being in the news. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's been the project of most of my professional life to get Americans to care about foreign aid and to get Americans to care about USAID. And they've never cared about it more and they've never read about it more and never been confronted with it more than they have now as the agency is sadly being disassembled.

And so personally, it's incredibly hard, and not hard because of my circumstances. I was a political appointee. I knew post-election I wasn't going to have a job January 20th. But of the tens of the thousands of civil service and foreign service workers at USAID of the foreign service nationals, so nationals of the countries in which USAID did its work around the world who are all facing this massive upheaval, you feel their... These are your colleagues. These are the people you were in the trenches with. You feel deeply about their circumstances in part because you were close to them, but in part, I think, also if you really countenance what this will mean, what pulling the rug out from under millions of people, tens of millions of people around the world who depend on lifesaving aid, you really confront what that means spiritually. I think it will really break you.

And so in my darkest moments I think about the mother whose child is now going to be born with HIV who otherwise would not be. I think about the severely malnourished kid whose life could instantly be revived with access to some food aid or a miracle paste that we're able to provide. And I think about that disappearing in those darkest moments. And so that's incredibly bleak. The final thing I'll say is even amidst everything that there is a wellspring of optimism and hope that more people have become alive to this work, aware of it, encouraged by it, and that I hope as we seek to rebuild the legacy of foreign aid, we can rebuild it with an awareness that didn't exist before.

Danny Crichton:

One of the questions I have for you, obviously you were at the top speechwriter for the agency, and you have this kind of unique role and I think know, Laurence, you had a similar role at USUN, U.S. Mission to the United Nations. But you have this need to communicate both externally to hundreds of different countries around the world, to thousands of different organizations that are receiving aides as grantees. But on the other hand, you also have this need to communicate to the American public of what is the importance of helping in countries you've never heard of, in continents that don't seem like priorities maybe to the average American. How do you sort of bridge that communications divide? Because that seems to be at the crux of USAID's challenges right now.

Maany Peyvan:

I think, and Laurence, who I've worked with for a long time and who is excellent at this as well, I think anyone who's been in that experience of working in foreign policy or in development or in Washington, really, you spend a lot of time talking to yourself. You spend a lot of time talking to people who know you, who understand you, who work in a similar field or who have an appreciation for what you do every day. And that can be consuming, but it can also feel repetitive. It can also feel as though you're just talking to yourself and not breaking through anywhere. So I think it was a big ambition of ours, coming certainly into the Biden administration under Samantha Power, to communicate what we did to the American people to be active on social media in a way no USAID administrator had ever been, to be very public in terms of the impact of the things that were happening around the world, and to craft arguments that we felt were compelling to folks day-to-day.

Some of those arguments are national security arguments about how development aid can really make Americans safer, whether that's preventing disease or stopping flows of migration, or you can really pick your cause. There are a lot of ways in which that is absolutely true. There are economic arguments about how it creates markets for future trade. The more engaged we are with foreign aid, the more likely we're to create trade partners that benefit us in the future. That's not rhetoric. That is seven of the top 10 trading partners in the United States today are all countries that used to receive foreign assistance from us. The real argument that we wanted to deliver was that America cares. America gives a shit about what happens to the fates of people all around the world.

You have to remember when we were coming in during the Biden administration, we were coming in during a global pandemic. If ever there was an event that showed you that what happened halfway around the world could impact and change your life in a dramatic way, it was that pandemic. And so we really did try and build on that idea to communicate to people that the fates of Americans were intertwined with the fates of people around the world, to communicate that we cared about them and that we were willing to do something about it, and to communicate frankly that America kicks ass at this. The people, the men and women of USA, the men and women of our military, of our foreign service, they can do things that no other country can do, that no international organization, UN, you name it, can do.

They can go in and stamp out an Ebola outbreak before it reaches our shores, before it reaches other countries. They can support not just the war effort in Ukraine, but the domestic effort to help that country rebuild its domestic institutions and economy to the point where its tech sector and agricultural sector were actually growing less year while the country was under assault from Russia. These are things that only America can do and that's a message that we really want to deliver to the American people.

Laurence Pevsner:

We've known each other a long time, Maany, and I've always admired your ability to do this, which is I think quite difficult. You spent a lot of time talking about, "Oh, this fiscally makes sense. It's better for the United States. We get out just as much as we put in." And you have this term, you say, "We should have spent less time talking about that and more time talking about how, forget whether it helps us or not. This is just a good and righteous thing to do." And I think that's a brave argument to make and I want to hear more of your thinking behind it just because it's the less cynical political argument, right? Normally when you get into politics, you have to be the realist all of a sudden. You have to say, "Okay, we're going to find what are the actual things that really motivate people? It's their pocketbooks. It's not their aspiring to their higher value." So what makes you think now in this moment of, as you were saying, there's a dark cloud around USAID, what gives you the idea that actually this is the moment to turn towards a more moral outlook?

Maany Peyvan:

I think there are three things that kind of compel me to feel like we need to pick that argument up again and really push forward. I think the first is I think the argument of pure naked self-interest is an argument that works really well with the foreign policy establishment, with the realist school of thinking. I think it's an argument that works or had worked pretty well with the Republican Party, and frankly, the lobbyists who supported the Republican Party and folks on the hill in terms of really emphasizing the national security argument, the competition with China argument, the economic benefits argument. I think those arguments are convincing to people who care deeply about America's national security and live within the sort of fabric of the foreign policy establishment.

Where I think those arguments fall flat are for people who don't follow this closely, who aren't necessarily paying attention day to day to this work or even aware of that work. I don't think talking about naked self-interest to those folks is going to inspire people. You may convince some, but you're not going to inspire many. And when you're talking about trying to build a movement and trying to build coalitions of support and trying to reach the American people, what you're talking about is inspiration. Americans, we should not forget, are an incredibly generous people. There is a long tradition in this country of religious tithing. We donate in this country over half a trillion dollars a year to charitable giving, and that's not just philanthropies and that's not just corporations. The majority of that giving is individual giving. I think we need to start tapping into that moral fabric of this country.

The final thing I'll say about why I think this argument [inaudible 00:09:45] is that it is what draws us to this work. The individuals who serve at USAID or who serve their country, yes, we care about national security. Yes, we care about economic security. Absolutely those things matter, but we are drawn to it because we feel deeply a sense of patriotism in our country that we can make the world better and that this work matters in the lives of other people around the world. If we believe that, if that's what inspires us and animates us, we need to give the American people some credit that that argument would inspire and animate them as well.

Danny Crichton:

One of the interesting things I'm observing here, obviously with Riskgaming, we oftentimes try to model incentives for individuals. And when I hear your first point about self-interest... I mean, most of our political simulations, most of the emergence that comes from this is people basically pursuing their own self-interest, right? You have a certain motivation. It could be a stock price, it could be fame, it doesn't have to be something that's just monetary. But your goal is sort of to build wealth, power, fame, all these sort of typical human heuristics. And I think it's interesting that you point out that this was a very effective bipartisan argument for decades going back that says, "Look, there's a huge incentive for the United States to build relationships with dozens of countries all around the world." That became even more acute in the 2010s as China was launching its Belt and Road Initiative up to a trillion dollars depending on how you count of development aid all around the world. Why has that pulled back?

Because when I hear it's like, "Well, self-interest isn't enough anymore," that to me is sort of insane. It's like saying, "I could make more money, but I have decided not to." And so what do you think has changed? Is it just that that silence is sort of from fear? Is that coming from some other factor? Because that to me kind of breaks my whole worldview.

Maany Peyvan:

I think there are a few things at work. I think there are a group of people amongst this party and amongst the Trump administration for whom the idea that giving something away may benefit you is simply too complex a thought. There's an America first dictum that says, "Unless that money is going directly to Americans, mostly in the form of tax cuts, that it's waste." I think there is some degree of ignorance and a refusal to engage in the complexity of the idea that through trade and through aid and through grant making, there is greater economic leverage to be had. I think it's not just that the arguments are failing. I think it's because some people genuinely don't believe that. They don't think that giving away foreign aid makes us stronger. That, to me, is obvious. It's both lived and proven. But I think there are for some people who really believe actually giving money away makes us look like chumps. It makes us look like suckers. It makes us look weak.

Danny Crichton:

Charity is a bad deal.

Maany Peyvan:

Charity is a bad deal, exactly. I think there is that wing a bit of what's going on here. I think also this has been undertaken as a project to drive efficiency and to make things work better. I spent six years of my life in Silicon Valley. I worked at Google. I worked at YouTube. I've been in the private sector multiple times in my career. There is a real arrogance that exists within the private sector just as there is in the public sector about what it means to be good at your job and about what it means to be really effective.

And I think what we're seeing is a bit of that private sector arrogance coming into the public sector and says, "You guys are inefficient. None of you are 10x-ers. None of you are the kinds of people who really will drive effectiveness to the degree and at the pace and with the level of grind that we do over in the private sector. And so you need to be cleared out and we need to bring in the kinds of people or just not replace you at all, with the kind of people who might thrive in that kind of more cutthroat environment.

What I would say to those people as someone who has worked in the private sector and who knows that mentality well and has definitely been on both sides of the grind, is to say, "There is some element in truth to the idea that in the public sector, you don't wake up every day and worry if you're going to make your quarter. You don't wake up every day and worry if you're going to be able to raise your Series B the way you need to. You worry about whether you're going to pay the paychecks of the people around you." I didn't as a political appointee ever have that fear. I know that fear very well. I saw at the private sector all the time.

But what the private sector almost never has to worry about are the life and death decisions that people who work at USAID in humanitarian relief and in the public sector and in development have to make every day. Do I risk the lives of these aid workers to deliver aid in this war zone? Do I take my limited budget and invest it in things that are going to save infants or children or people? They do not have the weight of those moral decisions that have to be made every day. So while everyone I think who has ever worked in federal government believes it could be more efficient and less bureaucratic and work more effectively, I think there is a level of appreciation that should be given to those folks for the moral weight of the things they're deciding every day. That's nothing close to what we had to do when I was working in the private sector.

Laurence Pevsner:

There is an opening, right? So if USAID is pulling away or is folding into the State Department or being slashed entirely, that obviously creates a vacuum. And we know that vacuum can be filled by a bunch of different players. There's a lot of talk about how China will come... especially on the African continent for example. We know China comes in with Belt and Road and tries to replace us there. Russia is there, other powers are obviously there. Someone is going to try to fill in the niche to say, "Okay, we will be the ones who are aid, or we will come to your support and therefore we'll gain all the benefits that you just talked about, the naked self-interest benefits that accrue there." One other group that, to your point doesn't normally do this but could potentially do this, is the private sector, right? We're starting to also see ways that maybe technology people are interested in helping. There is that good-hearted Americanness and there's also the naked self-interest as well. How do you see the private sector potentially filling in that gap?

Maany Peyvan:

Companies that are really trying to harness technology in a way that can change lives, can change outcomes in really hard-science fundamental ways. And I think though I don't see a tremendous opportunity for the private sector to come in and deliver humanitarian aid in a war zone, it's not a profitable environment or a stable environment in which I think to really do that kind of work, I do think there are real revolutions available in science that could potentially not just change our lives, but change the lives of people all around the world. So some of the clearest examples of this have to do with AI-driven protein mapping and using that technology to design more effective and less drug-resistant therapeutics, whether it's for tuberculosis or malaria, testing of different vaccines. There was an HIV vaccine trial that USAID was sponsoring that unfortunately the plug was pulled out of.

But there is that whole world of biotech I think that can be really animated in service of the lives of people all around the world. That would make a huge difference at lower cost. I think also to be very aware of the opportunities in agriculture as well in precision breeding and using AI to make more climate-resistant crops. For instance, there are farmers all around the world who for centuries had known the cycles of their climate and what grows when and how to manage it, who are now facing some of the hottest temperatures ever seen in terms of trying to be agriculturally productive. Unless we really equip those farmers to be more productive with the kind of technology and climate resistant seeds, we're going to just experience severe, severe hunger around the world in a very serious way. And by the way, those innovations, if you make a more heat-resistant maize or a perennial rice seed, those are things that benefit us as well. They make food cheaper here in the United States as well. So I think those are the natural opportunities one can think of.

I think downstream, there is a lot of interesting work that had been done in the logistics forecasting. When you're launching a big humanitarian response or you have a massive global health program that is trying to move medications all the way around the world or pre-positioned supplies, you can think about how AI-driven forecasting can really improve the logistics and delivery and day-to-day operations of those efforts. There was a really impressive company called Citus Analytics that had built a predictive model that said anytime we see an increase in rain in this region, we know there is going to be an uptick of malaria adjacent to it because malaria comes from mosquitoes which are waterborne, obviously. And so we will pre-position our malaria supplies around the world based on these predictive factors. That's the kind of technology that can really, I think, do a ton of good.

And then finally, when you work in over a hundred countries around the world, just bottom-line, baseline translation is a really, really difficult problem to overcome. And so if you are a Haitian civil society organization or humanitarian relief group that wants to help out, but you speak Haitian Creole, being able to use generative AI to instantly translate those documents, be able to access and communicate with different actors in the space that you had before is going to be transformational. And so I do see a real opportunity for companies that are doing that work.

Danny Crichton:

Last year, one of our most popular pieces was on large language models, obviously, are really dependent on English and Chinese because they have the largest corpi, corpuses, corpi?

Maany Peyvan:

Corpi.

Danny Crichton:

Corpa, there we go. Someone actually has-

Maany Peyvan:

We're the speech writers, right? We should know.

Danny Crichton:

Yes, I'm just a podcast jockey. But one of the challenges is as you get to smaller languages, and I emphasized Igbo and a bunch of others in Africa, that in some cases they're spoken by tens of millions of people. But because of a digital divide, because of access to technology, none of that text is able to actually be injected into these models, which means, to your last point on translation, none of these models are designed for many of these languages. You can't actually translate very easily. And so there's a huge challenge there.

But I actually take this much more broadly, which across all the examples you just gave to me is to me the power of not just USAID, but this idea of why would you go to an emerging market where there's theoretically no profit? And to me, it's this set of hundreds of different types of problems you don't see in the industrialized world, in the United States where, okay, maybe it's malaria, maybe it's lack of income, maybe it's different types of health problems, but these are problems that drive innovation.

These are ways in which, if you look at China through companies like Transsion in Africa, which is now one of the largest mobile phone distributors on the continent, you have all these challenges that suddenly you're like, "Look, there must be a way to deliver a $50 cell phone to people who otherwise can't afford a multi-thousand dollar iPhone." And by forcing those sorts of challenges and problems in front of you, you suddenly realize, actually, we can pull things out. Actually, we can design something new. Actually, the AI model doesn't have to maybe be as frontier as it needed to be. And if you go back to just classic Clayton Christensen disruption theory, you start with those very cheap devices, you start with those cheap models, it works in the emerging market, and suddenly it comes backwards.

And I'm remembering a piece in the Mekong Review, which otherwise has a bunch of literary reviews, and I think it was there. It was looking at farmers in Vietnam and how they're using drones. And thanks to the cheap drones that are available from DJI, Vietnamese farmers, folks who aren't making a lot of money, are managing their entire fields using drone technology. There's gorgeous photography and a discussion of what they're doing. And so maybe it's not absolutely the frontier of ag tech and AI and the opportunity there, but even the simplest technology can start to rebuild and create wealth in even the smallest communities and poorest communities.

And so to me, the opportunity is this interaction, this ability to see new problems, to kind of open your mind to new ways of doing things. And that's what I worry about from this kind of creative destruction, this idea of if we just don't inject new ideas in here, you get calcified. And that to me is a long-term threat to the competitive United States. I realize that self-interest doesn't apparently matter to anyone, but the secondary order effect here of that lack of engagement is very concerning.

Maany Peyvan:

Yeah, I mean, you said it incredibly well, Danny, and there was a lot of writing around the sort of bottom billion and the market opportunities that existed.

Danny Crichton:

And Paul Collier, who was on the podcast last year with his new book Left Behind, who also wrote Bottom Billion.

Maany Peyvan:

I remember when I was in grad school, this was the hot topic, that there really are market opportunities here, but you didn't see a lot of... There was just this whole idea that capital was a coward. You were not going to move into markets that felt unstable or didn't present you with easy opportunities overnight. I have to say that I think that mentality has really changed. I was in Zambia not very long ago in a rural village. Bayer is selling seeds in that village. There are John Deere tractors in that village. There is a growth. And by the way, there are also Chinese companies in that village too. Let's be very clear.

I think there is a bit more of an appreciation and understanding of the economic opportunity that exists in not just developing markets, but even what you might call sort of fringe markets. As these things become cheaper, as it becomes easier to develop an app that can help a farmer in Vietnam or East Africa or South India, as those things become cheaper, the potential markets become massive and the potential opportunity become really astounding. And so, look, Africa is going to have a growing population for years to come. It's the last continent I think that's actually going to still be growing. And so to be shortsighted now about what these markets might represent to you or your company or even to our country in the future, I think is incredibly shortsighted.

Danny Crichton:

While we're talking about all kinds of new innovations and technologies, I mean, let's revert back to the original story, which is USAID or USAID was just dismantled. Almost the entire staff was fired. I think they're down to basically a skeletal crew from my understanding. These contracts are paused across thousands of different organizations all around the world. What happens next? So all this is shut down, and let's assume that that just gets locked in. Can this be reactivated in the future? Can you rebuild those relationships? Are people sort of waiting for the money spigot to turn back on? Would you rebuild the organization from scratch? Because presumably, I imagine, I mean in the TikTok of politics in DC, Democrats will be in power at some point in the future. They will want to sort of rebuild this, presumably. What would that look like in your mind?

Maany Peyvan:

So I'll talk about this in the short term and in the long term. So I think in the short term, this is a massive, massive attack on the global foreign aid infrastructure. And even if we were able to snap our fingers and turn the funding flows on tomorrow, which let's be clear, we cannot and we have not, despite all this talk about waivers and everything else, people are going to die. People are dying already. There was a UNAIDS report that came out that said, if PEPFAR is shut down, that 6 million people are going to die of HIV unnecessarily who are currently on treatment. That is a Holocaust death in terms of proportion. And so my hope of hope is that more of this life-saving aid gets turned back on in a serious way, that USAID is able... Let's not get caught up with whether USAID, the institution is what survives. Let's get caught up with whether the work itself survives and whether the people who do that work are able to continue to do it.

My hope of hopes is that there is some version far more present and activated and supported than is currently we're witnessing now gets brought back online. But already there are organizations that have crumbled, that have fired people, that have furloughed people. I think 30% of the local organizations providing lifesaving relief in Sudan have already folded. This is a massive blow. And we're talking about it here in the abstract on a podcast in a very intellectual manner. The images of what it looks like when children are defeated by AIDS, when infants don't have enough to eat, when mothers can't deliver in a safe manner, when food aid doesn't reach the people, when cholera ravages a community, these are horrific things to see. Those images are coming, and they will be coming not because of a war and not because of an airstrike, and not because of some horrible act of God, but because of an act of man, of the acts of the United States.

So in the short term, I am hopeful that we can get to a better place. In the long term. I really believe that we need to take this conversation back to the American people, that we need to make the American people proud of the good that their aid has done around the world, that with less than 1% of every dollar in taxes that they spend... That's the amount of money we're talking about here. Less than one penny of every dollar that you spend. Their money has done tremendous good around the world. It spurred a green revolution that averted an age of famine around the world.

In the 1970s, we were all terrified. I wasn't born, you guys weren't born, but the world was caught up and terrified with a fear of overpopulation. Because we were able to raise agricultural productivity in countries around the world, that age of famine was averted. We're able to eradicate smallpox, to nearly eradicate polio, to save 60 million lives from tuberculosis, to turn back the tide on AIDS and HIV and malaria. These are all things the American people should be proud of. This is your legacy. And I think we, and when I say we, I mean definitely the elements of the Democratic Party, need to become braver about taking that message to people, to inspire people, to not just give, but to give more and to give more generously and to be the force for good that we know we can be around the world again.

Laurence Pevsner:

So we've been talking about the generosity of Americans and getting out there and having a presence, being in all these different countries. If you're not there, you're not a part of it. If you are there, then you can actually have a voice and have a say. A recurring theme on the podcast this year, you were in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson's cover story in The Atlantic about social isolation, which I talk to just about everyone I meet about. He makes this point that people are literally meeting each other in person less and less, that the architects are designing our houses so that our bedrooms are bigger and our living rooms are smaller. The third places are shutting down. And that's true domestically. That's true in our neighborhoods, in our homes, in our social lives. It's also true across the country. People are moving around less.

You have Yoni Appelbaum's book, Stuck, about how people are literally not moving anymore. And then during COVID, we were all literally shut in our houses, not traveling, not seeing the world, not interacting and meeting with each other. And one of the great engines of empathy is that when you actually... To your point, we can discuss this intellectually, but it's totally different when you're on the ground and you see something.

I remember one of my first trips when I was at USUN was to Niger, which is maybe arguably the poorest country on earth. And it was just different to go from talking with them in the security council about the issues that were important to them and then actually be there and see it with your own eyes and understand. And later, when a coup happened in that country, I had a much better feeling of why that was possible just from having been there. And so I'm curious if short term, maybe something will happen, maybe not. Long-term, there's a vision. Is there something in the middle here where it's like, "Oh, can we build towards..." As we start to pull ourselves out of COVID, try to reverse these trends of social isolation, is there a way that we can kind of pull that together to start reinvigorating that American generosity that you're so interested in?

Maany Peyvan:

It's a really complex and sort of interesting question you're presenting, Laurence. I think if we're going to try and do everything we can to bring systems back online today, if down the road we want to become even more generous, what do we do in this sort of medium term? What kind of model can really be presented?

There has been enthusiasm and talk about a model in which America becomes far more of a lender than a grant maker. Under the first Trump administration, they created the Development Finance Corporation, taking different parts, different tools in the toolbox of the American foreign policy establishment to lend at really favorable rates to the private sector to build infrastructure and to engage in projects in places all around the world that otherwise may not be profitable for American companies to do. And so I could completely see a model that evolves over time where we have a super empowered DFC that has a much bigger budget, a bit of a stronger development mandate to make loans at much more concessional rates and to take on greater risk, and to be engaged in the world in that way. This is essentially how the Chinese are engaged around the world. They're not giving grants the way we had been at USA. They are essentially loan-making body and institution.

And so if the Trump administration really wanted to remake the foreign aid system in a way that felt more transactional and felt purely to the benefit, I'm talking about pure financial return of the American people, that could be a way to do it. It will be a far less effective and far less generous way to do it. But it is a model and I think could be something we see in the medium term.

Danny Crichton:

Wow, we are going through this period of destruction, and one can only hope that out of the green shoots, something of creation will come out of it. But Maany, thank you so much for joining us.

Maany Peyvan:

Thank you so much, Danny. Thank you, Laurence for having me. I really appreciate it.

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