• I think the first thing is just that it's surreal. I was in Afghanistan first when the Taliban were in their last reign, which lasted from the late 1990s through to September the 11th. It was a time when it was one of the most shocking governments on Earth. There were public executions in the main stadiums, and Kabul, the capital city, was a ghost town. There were very few people living there, very few vehicles, and half the buildings were still in ruins from the Civil War. They were even hanging televisions from trees as part of their campaign against any kind of image.

• Many Afghans will say, "Okay, we don't like the way the Taliban are behaving; we don't like the way they're treating women; we feel a real absence of freedom." But my goodness, we're grateful that we're not liable to be killed at any moment.

• If you're looking for a symbol of how the West got overconfident and how it went wrong, Iraq and Afghanistan are prime examples where we spent over $3 trillion—$3,000 billion—and achieved close to nothing. These were failures beyond imagining. You can't think of a bigger failure than to invade a country, get rid of the Taliban, spend 20 years there, and then hand it back to the Taliban again. It's just definitional failure.

• There’s a striking statistic that one of my friends, George, found: the head of UK cyber security had a job posted online with an annual salary of £65,000 to combat threats from the CCP, Russia, Iran, hackers, and the dark web. It’s astonishing that such a critical position is offered such a low salary.

• In some ways, their situation seems even worse, as they spend four and a half hours every day making fundraising calls, leaving them with no time to think about politics. They are just focused on bringing in money all the time.

• There is a beautiful phrase from the English poet William Blake, who speaks of mind-forged manacles. As humans, we often surround ourselves with constraints; we are incredibly tribal, conventional, and conformist. We attempt to read and follow rules that ultimately make no sense, shaped by cultures that lead us to engage in bizarre behaviors.

• For instance, if I post something trivial, like a joke about Elon Musk, I might receive 17,000 to 20,000 likes, but if I share a serious message about addressing extreme poverty in Africa, I might only get about 100 likes. This stark contrast illustrates how the online landscape prioritizes sensationalism over substantive discussion. It can be quite disheartening to see that a serious article, which I care about deeply, garners a mere 10,000 to 15,000 views, while a trivial joke can reach four to five million people.

• By getting out of the way and allowing people to manage their own resources, we see remarkable transformations. It’s not a charity worker coming in to do it for them; it’s simply giving them the cash and returning three months later. The results are striking: the percentage of households with electricity increased from about a third to nearly 80%, and three-quarters of the families ended up with a cow. Roofs were repaired, everyone had a latrine, school enrollment increased, and people began eating twice a day instead of once every two days.

• This brings us to the perspective of the saying, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll be able to feed himself for a lifetime.” It’s a lovely phrase that suggests an instant solution: just teach someone to fish, and their problems are solved. This idea flatters us, as it implies that we possess the knowledge that others lack. However, what I have realized through cash transfers is that this notion does not hold true.

Why doesn’t it work? Firstly, in many cases, people already know how to fish; they just don’t have the money for a fishing hook. Many communities have business ideas ready to go; they simply need a bit of cash to buy a bicycle to transport their goods or invest in equipment to turn milk into yogurt. They already know how to fish; they just lack the necessary tools.

Secondly, every household is different. One person may want to open a yogurt business, while their neighbor may wish to send their child to school, and another may need funds for healthcare or home repairs. Cash allows individuals to address their unique needs and aspirations, enabling them to improve their circumstances in ways that are most meaningful to them.

• In that case, they don’t want to fish; they want to open a bakery. And then, I think the final thing is, of course, somebody in that community will put the money to use so much more efficiently. If it's their own money and they're fixing up their house, they do it for a fraction of the costs that a foreign charity would incur because they’d bring in their brother and their cousins and they’d use local materials. It’s a completely different world.

• They concluded that the most sustainable way to provide water was for the girls to carry the buckets 300 yards to the well, fill them with water, and then use them for washing. I was baffled, thinking, "What are you doing?" This was a $440,000 project. I suggested that they could have simply given $2,000 to the head teacher, which would have allowed them to support 20 times as many schools. Their response was that the head teacher might have stolen the money. I retorted, "We stole the money; we literally stole $38,000 out of $40,000 here."

• The issue lies partly in our risk aversion. We are often unwilling to trust people, leading to excessive spending on follow-ups, financial checks, controls, and monitoring. A significant portion of the funding is wasted on visits to ensure that the buckets are still present. Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy once said, "Nobody gets fired for hiring Deloitte." His point was that people prefer to be wrong in a reliable manner than to take risks and potentially face consequences.

• In a way, I'm less worried about proportions; what I'm worried about is that there are 300 million more people who can't put food on the table, and we can fix it. I mean, I think the point about direct cash transfers is that the most useful thing you can do is send cash. It's not about being a world genius who really knows about whatever; for example, I could be like, "I'm a real expert on podcasting, so I need to go and teach the people in this village how to podcast or how to sell sandwiches at Heathrow Airport." No, they know much better than we do. It's also about trust—it's about saying, "I trust you; I believe that you know much more about your own environment than I do."

• When discussing the impact of the Sam Bankman-Fried effective altruism fallout on forward-thinking charity initiatives, it is important to note the contrasting approaches. Initiatives like Give Directly present a cool name and a sexy idea, focusing on a bottom-up approach. They provide the most robust resources to individuals, allowing them to choose how to spend it, in contrast to effective altruism (EA), which typically involves top-down analyses to determine the most efficient charities