Patterns and Stories Podcast

About Patterns and Stories Podcast

Public policy and management (by Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik) patternsandstories.substack.com (https://patternsandstories.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Luca Dellanna

Category

education · government

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Apr 2025

Latest episode

6 Sept 2025

Latest episodes

10 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Sept 2025

   Yohan Iddawela on using satellites for economic data

   Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik interview Yohan Iddawela, a data scientist at the Asian Development Bank, about leveraging satellite data to estimate economic development in data-scarce regions.

2. 

   16 Aug 2025

   Philipp Krause on Public Finance Management

   Hosts Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik interview international expert Philipp Krause on influencing government spending and fiscal governance.

3. 

   2 Aug 2025

   Guru Madhavan on Systems Engineering

   Author Guru Madhavan discusses systems engineering with hosts Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik, exploring engineering's role as both a problem solver and creator in this interview.

4. 

   19 Jul 2025

   Cheryl Strauss Einhorn on decision-making

   Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, author and decision-making expert, discusses her AREA method for solving complex problems and distinguishes between uncertainty and ambiguity in an interview with Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

5. 

   22 Jun 2025

   Barry Ritholtz on How Not To Invest

   Barry Ritholtz discusses with hosts Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik his book, "How Not to Invest," exploring common mistakes that destroy wealth and how investors can avoid them in this interview.

6. 

   7 Jun 2025

   Shanta Devarajan on the Sri-Lankan Crisis

   Professor Shanta Devarajan analyzes the Sri Lankan economic crisis, emphasizing the critical need for early intervention and addressing underlying governance issues, in an interview with Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

7. 

   24 May 2025

   Dag Detter on unlocking the hidden value of public assets

   Author Dag Detter discusses unlocking hidden value in public assets by improving accounting practices and asset management, which allows governments to make informed decisions and invest in the future in an interview with Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

8. 

   28 Apr 2025

   Lina Ashar on Education

   Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Lina Ashar (https://in.linkedin.com/in/linaashar), the founder of Dreamtime Learning (https://dreamtimelearning.com/). We discuss how to shift from transactional to transformational teaching. We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna (https://luca-dellanna.com/) and Ismail Manik (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismail-manik-8234179). The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency. Highlights: * “We do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works. What we're doing is like a factory model. It's like compliance, not curiosity.” * “I keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they're going to be successful. That's a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you're lost.” * “If their whole school time is spent on learning the core curriculum, where is the time for kids to specialize? Where do they get those 10,000 hours that they need to become a specialist? So you have to free up time in the child's day for them to become highly specialized.” * [Lina discusses one of the exercises she does with the kids.] “You take one of the things the President said, it's recorded and on video. You take CNN's take on it, and then you take Fox's take on it, [and you show it to the kids]. This exercise teaches kids about communication and cognitive bias.” * “The number one reason anyone disrupts anything is because they're bored. My kids rate our lessons. If one of our lessons doesn't get rated highly, we go back to redesign it.” * “Kids can be bored for a couple of reasons. Either the learning challenge is too much or it's too low. They're either bored because they can't comprehend and progress to the next step, or they're bored because it's too simple. One solution is to create scaffolding processes for kids who are over-challenged, whose brains aren't able to connect what you're teaching to what they know. The second thing is, if you scaffold within the lesson plan itself, you solve 90% of your problem.” * “To parents, I say, please be brave. Please be more courageous. Please don't be scared of change because the world around your kids is changing so rapidly. Embrace it and dare to help them learn differently.” Full Transcript: Ismail (00:00) Welcome, Lina, to our podcast, Patterns and Stories. Looking back, what do you think were the biggest gaps in the current or traditional education that you wanted to fix? What were the key things that you wanted to address urgently? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (00:28) You use the word reform, right, in your question, and it's very difficult to reform anything, especially in education. So you basically just have to go in there, do your disruptive thing, and hope it sticks. It's as crazy and as simple as that. I always say I'm a positive disruptor, I'm an outlaw, right? Because I'm always the cowboy trying to do very different things, especially in places like India that are still very conventional in their thinking. We were ruled by the British Raj; the education system was set up by the British in India, and we've not really been able to pull away from that. Where public policy and reforms are really challenging, I think it takes disruptive entrepreneurs just to come in, shake things up, and then when it works, then everybody says, wow, this works, and let's go along and, you know, shift the journey. When I came in in 1993 with Kangaroo Kids, we actually only started with 10 kids. Why 10 kids? Because every parent who walked in the door would say, “Will you get my child ready for the entrance exam?” This is into junior kindergarten or grade one of this school. So, they're saying school needs an entrance exam for a little child who was supposed to be curious and explore and not be taught things by rote. And yet, what these preschools were doing at that time was rote teaching kids. Then, what they did was almost like backward corruption; they'd go and get the exam papers of the entrance exams for three-year-olds and four-year-olds. Then, they would take that back and put it in their curriculum. So, children could answer who the father of the nation is at the age of three. That is such an abstract concept, right? Father of the Nation for somebody who is a historical figure. How do three-year-olds even get their minds around that? They can't. So, you basically were teaching them how to parrot a response. And that's what, in 1993, I started getting away from. I said, No, I will not turn your child into a parrot, but I will do what's developmentally appropriate for your child. And started teaching parents. And that's why I write the books, because if you teach parents that there are windows of opportunity in brains that are developing, you explain it through examples and specifics, saying, a child's got a lazy eye, what does the doctor do? And they'll say they bandage one eye. But which eye do they bandage? They bandage the strong eye. Why do they bandage the strong eye? Because the weaker eye will now be forced to develop that neural pathway for eyesight in the other eye. But if an adult has a weak eye, doing the same exercise doesn't work for the adult because the neurocircuitry is already pretty strong. The highways in the brain are already set. So when you explain it to parents with these tangible examples, then parents start understanding, OK, we're saying that we're going to take the windows of opportunity that are open between 0 and 6, and we're going to do the right activities and exploration and allow discoveries. That's how the brain will develop. Neuroscience is teaching us so much day after day, and it's still only the tip of the iceberg. We still don't know what human consciousness is, for example. Most brilliant scientists cannot actually tell you what human consciousness is. We don't know all these things, right? But we do increasingly know more and more about the brain, like the example I just gave you. There's even more we know today about how the subconscious works, how beliefs get set in a child. And we do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works. What we're doing is like a factory model. It's like compliance, not curiosity. That's what we're teaching kids, right? Behave, sit down. Now, that was when I did in 1993. In 2017, I sold Kangaroo Kids and Billabong because we're coming to a different age altogether. And remember, I sold it before ChatGPT became a thing, I sold it before AI was already at our doorstep. But because I did so much research, I knew that things were going to change. Things were around the corner. And that is what we call the creator economy. So, what do we have to do in the creative economy? What do we have to teach kids? How do we teach kids to feel emotionally safe when things are changing so quickly? The outside world has changed so rapidly, but from an evolutionary perspective, our brains and our minds and our hearts and our bodies have not changed. So, how do we do it so that kids feel emotionally safe? They know how to regulate in these times of rapid change. And how do we get deep learning and happiness? Nobody's saying, “I want to drive a Ferrari.” [They say] I want to be happy. But we don't teach kids how to be actually happy. Ismail (05:36) Lina, I was going through one of your earlier books. I think it is from 2012. “Who Do You Think You're Kidding?” It's an interesting title. One of the chapters at the start is titled 21st Century Child. Can you expand a little bit? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (05:57) Do not read that book. Because the information there is from 2012. Today, if I were to rewrite the book, it would be completely different. In this world of AI and everything else, who are the types of people who will be valued going forward? From there, you can extrapolate the kind of skills they'll need. Call them 21st-century skills, just call them human skills, call them whatever. The first type of person in a world full of AI is going to be the highly emotionally intelligent people. Right? So, you'll have AI giving you a more accurate diagnosis than a doctor, but you'll still need a doctor to hold your hand and say what this disease means to you, and how it is going to impact your life, and some of the things you can do to self-regulate. So, I think doctors are going to change from prescribers of medicine to lifestyle doctors who teach you how to cope at an emotional level with what's going on. So, doctors will actually understand more deeply the connection between the brain, the heart, the stomach, and the gut. The gut is the seat of so many things. We only treat the brain and the heart in terms of education, but we have to teach kids to heal their guts as well, constantly. So, this kind of doctor is going to be very different. He's going to be forever learning, but he's going to have a very high EQ. So that's number one. Your second person is somebody with what we can call a personal copyright, a personal monopoly, which is a subset of skills and interests that uniquely come together, making it very difficult to replicate this person. Like, take me for example. I've read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours about the brain. And in the brain, not just reading about the technical aspects of the brain, right? I'm reading all the research on motivation. I'm reading all the research on when the brain understands why it's doing something, and why it does it better. What does fear do to the brain? What does joy do to the brain? What are the brain chemicals that get released? How do they get released differently based on your thoughts? So my reading is vast in the area of the brain. Then, my second area of reading, which is very, very vast, is in the area of human behavior. So what makes people stuck? What gets them moving forward? Again, what motivates them? What drives them? How do people come up with deeply curious questions? And if we allow them to follow those deeply curious questions, how could their life really be impacted? And how could humanity be impacted in return? Because kids are really following a path of deep curiosity, trying to solve something, something that they don't understand about the world, or so forth. So that's the second type of person. So we've got EQ, personal copyright, personal monopoly, and a subset of skills. My other subset of skills is that I understand the science of learning. So I know how to design it based on the brain. But I also keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they're going to be successful. That's a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you're lost. So, the second type of person is one with a personal monopoly. The third type of person is the most specialized person in their field. So we were shocked this year because there's an institution in India called the IIT. So everyone was rushing to IITs to become engineers, and this year, for the first time, these kids don't have jobs. So they've spent their entire life preparing to be accepted into the IIT, huge amounts of money to be trained and tutored to be accepted into the IIT, and when they've finished the IIT, they've got no job. You've got to be the best in the field for you to be highly successful. So that's the third type of person. And the fourth type of person is a moonshot thinker. A moonshot thinker. Somebody who thinks in a visionary way, in ways that people don't usually think. People who think in disruptive ways, people who think in divergent ways, people who connect the dots that other people won't connect, people who think about how to connect A, B, and C to solve a problem somebody else won't put together easily. So, if those are the four types of people that will be valued in the world going forward. I came across these four types of people after doing lots and lots of interviews, lots and lots of research, and reading. So I've interviewed people like Seth Godin. I've interviewed people like Angela D. Duckworth, the author of “Grit,” and based on this, I'm saying, “Okay, these are four types of people who will be valued.” Now, if you take those four types of people and you now extrapolate the skills that will create those four types of people, you need an education system that's highly focused on giving kids the skills and tools of EQ, and in fun and engaging ways, not through theory. We [Dreamstime] do such interesting things. For example, you watch one scene in a movie and you watch it with four different soundtracks: one that's motivational, one that's scary, one that's romantic. You ask kids to decide on the scene and what is going on based on these four soundtracks. Then, kids immediately start thinking divergently about the impact of music on who they are. Or the impact of watching a movie on how our emotions get affected. And then you'll teach them that when you watch somebody cry on a screen, the mirror neurons that are the basis for empathy get fired. Even though we are doing this podcast through a screen, our mirror neurons are still firing with each other. We've still got a sense of connection. So you're going to build divergent thinking in your curriculum. You're going to build high amounts of EQ, building and developing curriculum; you're going to give kids free time to specialize. Because if their whole school time is spent on learning the core curriculum, where is the time for kids to specialize? Where do they get those 10,000 hours that they need to become a specialist? So you have to free up time in the child's day for them to become highly specialized. And then you've got to free up time for them to explore different things and ask those deeply curious questions that get them to start thinking about what problem they want to solve in the world. How do they want to contribute to humanity? Luca Dellanna (12:25) Thank you so much, Lina. I love what you're saying, and especially I loved how you said that your 2012 book was already outdated. I remember that when I was at university, I was studying some books from the 60s, and while maybe the principles of the field didn't change, we definitely should have improved how we are teaching it. And the fact that the book was the same meant that no one was thinking about how to improve the teaching. I love how you seem so curious and always adapting. How do you communicate this to the teachers who work for you? How do you get them to adapt and change the traditional way of teaching? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (13:18) So we have a Dreamtime curriculum that we started a year ago, and now, in India, Oman, and Dubai, over 50 schools use it. And we're only one year in the making. Because the fact is this, that you can't get teachers to understand the whole range of the research that I've done for all these years, brain science, behavioral science, the future context of the world, the science of learning, that's hours and hours and hours I've packed into doing what I'm doing. So I work with people we call curiosity and excitement architects. In traditional lingo, you call them instructional designers. But if you say you're an instructional designer, then what is an instructional designer gonna do? Gonna take some content and design it to be instructed. So we call them curiosity and excitement architects. I do the training and work directly with each of these 80 “curiosity and excitement architects.” And what we do is we actually create digitally and physically, so we have workbooks as well, the curriculum that kids will use in the classroom. It's scripted, it's got all the prompts and everything else that a teacher will do. [In one exercise we do,] kids are gonna decode what makes a good story. They're gonna go in their groups. So one group's gonna be X (previously Twitter), one group's going to be Facebook, one group's going to be Instagram, and one group's going to be YouTube. It's relevant and relatable because that is the world that the kids are in. Now they have to understand, and they've got handouts, to understand how these four different mediums of telling stories work. How do they use algorithms? How do they hook you? Kids start understanding how the brain is hooked on fear. It's on alert for fear all the time. That's why 24-7 breaking news is always horrendous; that's how it hooks our brains to watch and gets the TV ratings up. So, these are the things that kids learn from doing the simple exercise of taking a concept and creating an emotional story through one of these. They put the music to it. They do everything. Now that's a way more exciting way for kids to do stories or teach a concept that they've learned. This is all scaffolded in a design. So every classroom now only needs a smart TV, which is not expensive. All of this multimedia and everything else is in the design. The scripting is given to them. For example, the teacher walks around the room, and instead of saying, “Oh, that's a pretty picture,” she's got her growth mindset responses, questions to ask, coaching questions, like, “What would happen if you change that color? What do you think would change? How do you think creating the story in this way is going to resonate with an audience? Who is your audience?” So, asking questions that prompt her thinking, but she's got all the questions with her. They're in the script. So till we can get to a space where, like, you take an IB school, how can that ever come in and be easily accessible by everyone? That is a thought that I had when I created the curriculum I did. But it goes beyond the IB in that it teaches kids about their brains and behavior deeply. How to master their emotions deeply in a way that the IB framework, with existing teachers and their level of training, cannot do. So this is how we train the teachers. Every time they open the learning management system, it's a training for them. And teachers are saying that as they teach kids, they learn so much about themselves, and they start changing their own patterns, belief systems, and ways of thinking about the world. Because, for example, if you're going to do something relevant in the world today, right? You take one of the things the President said, it's recorded and on video. You take CNN's take on it, and then you take Fox's take on it, [and you show it to the kids]. This exercise teaches kids about communication and cognitive bias. About how tolerance is not something that we're embedding in the world, we're pulling it further apart, creating friction and wars. We're creating, you know, things like trade wars because the world is not seeing itself as one. Yeah, but kids will learn this through things like this. All these activities are designed to make kids curious and then get them excited. I'll give you an example, math's great too. So, before we start a session, there's what we call an emotional hook. And an emotional hook shows two faces, one of which is slightly different than the other. We ask kids which one they find more attractive. And they'll say this one. And we'll say, you know your brain? I'm not teaching kids what beauty looks like, but the brain's response – that the brain finds symmetrical faces more beautiful than non-symmetrical faces; that's a fact. Then you can teach kids how to look at the uniqueness of a person who may not have a completely symmetrical face. But this is a fact, and kids then get, “Really? Is this how it is?” And then we say, okay, research who the most beautiful people in the world are and figure out what their symmetry is. Now they're hooked into what symmetry is. Then we show them why the brain loves symmetry in nature and everything else. That's how our brains have evolved, to like that balance and that beauty and that symmetry. Then we teach them about symmetry, and then we want to teach them about the uniqueness of an individual. So then we show them how snowflakes – each one is perfectly symmetrical, but there are no identical snowflakes. Then they go on to create a snowflake of their own. Grade two. So maths, teaching symmetry, but they've learned so much about the brain and behaviour that they would not have known if they just learned symmetry from a textbook. Ismail (19:50) Lina, thank you for your enthusiasm about it. It motivates us as well. Yesterday, I saw a job advertisement from the World Bank, and the title was “Innovation Officer – Storytelling.” This was one of the strangest job titles I've seen. So, in a sense, the job market and everything are changing. I think most of the people in the policy world, economists and others as well, agree that our system, the traditional system, kind of over-prioritizes credentials and under-prioritizes some of the things that you mentioned. There was this book, which became very popular, by David Epstein called “Range,” which kind of points out that if you're trained more as a generalist and limit kind of specialization, maybe at a later stage… How do you think about these kinds of issues? The job market is changing; how do we adjust the education of a child to suit the rapid change in the world around him or her? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (21:15) First thing is, I think I should go and apply for that job. Look, policy is very slow to change. I don't know how it is in the countries you live in, but we've come up with the new education policy, and it's just a document that's taken from the best practices all across the world. But how do you go from A to Z? How do you scaffold that process? It doesn't exist. You can change the policy, but if you don't have a plan to execute it in its new format, then it's of no use. So, for me, I prefer to work at the grassroots with the kids. We're an education brand where children see something on Instagram and go to their parents saying, "I want to go to this school." That's my constant challenge, because education is this strange area where your consumer and your customer are two different people. Someone buys the education, but somebody else is actually experiencing it. We need to start turning that on its head. We've got to put the power back in the kids' hands. The kids know what's relevant and relatable. They understand that the future will be different. They know how to use ChatGPT and are learning much faster than we are. I think it's our fear of change that's holding them back. When I work with kids, if we're teaching them about plants, we tell them about all the new avenues of work that are now open. In our teacher training, we explain to the teachers why the learning design is structured as it is. Because if teachers understand the bigger picture—where the world is heading—they can teach more effectively. We've destroyed 52% of the world's forests. If we don't raise mindful consumers who feel whole within themselves without needing Gucci, Prada, Maserati, and all of that, then we won't have a world that can sustain future generations. That's what we teach the teachers: why the curriculum exists as it does, what major global problems we're trying to address, and how these children will become the leaders who tackle those problems. Then, you work with the kids, teaching them about innovations and emerging trends. Regarding teacher training, teachers don't get paid very much in India. I don't know how it is where you are, but our teachers aren't properly trained. People talk about Finland's education system, but look at what Finnish teachers are paid—they earn as much as doctors. You can't simply transplant Finland's education model to India when Indian teachers operate in a completely different framework. Your kids end up worse off because you've adopted a system that teachers can't effectively implement. The second challenge is how to put teachers on a career path that teaches them entrepreneurship and skills to improve their own lives, which in turn inspires them to lift the lives of their students. I believe that meaningful change rarely happens from the top down. Real disruption begins at the grassroots level and then bubbles up through the system. Luca Dellanna (24:15) In every class, there are different students. How do you ensure that everyone is engaged? If there is a disruptive kid, what do you do? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (24:32) I don't use the word a disruptive kid, firstly. I say an active child. We don't go to the root of why kids disrupt. I'll ask you. Why would kids disrupt a class? Luca Dellanna (24:35) I would say that the number one thing is that the teacher is not interesting or the lesson is not interesting. Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (24:49) Absolutely. The number one reason anyone disrupts anything is because they're bored. My kids rate our lessons. If one of our lessons doesn't get rated highly, we go back to redesign it. Kids can be bored for a couple of reasons. Either the learning challenge is too much or it's too low. They're either bored because they can't comprehend and progress to the next step, or they're bored because it's too simple. One solution is to create scaffolding processes for kids who are over-challenged, whose brains aren't able to connect what you're teaching to what they know. The second thing is, if you scaffold within the lesson plan itself, you solve 90% of your problem. For example, have you ever seen the TED Talk "Paradox of Choice"? It's a really interesting talk in which this researcher [Barry Schwartz] talks about how excess choice makes us less happy. He goes through the research and explains that once upon a time, you'd go to a store to buy jeans, and you'd have dark jeans or light jeans. You'd pick the color you wanted and walk out. Now you've got dark jeans and light jeans, jeans with zips and buttons and buckles, jeans that are stone-washed and ripped—there are millions of types to choose from. And the brain doesn't like it. The brain gets anxious with too much choice. We believe choice is good because the world of consumerism wants us to believe that, but it's not always the case. If you teach kids this concept at a very young age, they start thinking about things very differently. So, how would you teach the paradox of choice to kids who are three or four years old? You'd start by showing them two wardrobes. One wardrobe has just two colored t-shirts, the other has numerous t-shirts with superheroes and various designs. You ask them which wardrobe they would choose from, and most kids will pick the one with more options. Then you help them understand, using a simple brain model, what choice does to the brain. With adults, I explain it like this: Once upon a time, you'd go to a DVD store, pick up a DVD, come home, and watch it. You were very happy. You'd pick maybe two DVDs, make your popcorn, sit down with your family, and watch the movie. It was great. Today, you have hundreds of platforms to choose from, and then hundreds of thousands of movies within each one. The brain gets confused. So, excess choice is actually making us less happy. You can teach this to very young kids, and then when the kids become consumers, they actually train their parents. I just came back from a conference where somebody asked me how we tangibly see the difference in kids. One of the educators there is a parent whose children attend my online school, and he also uses our curriculum for his school. He gave two examples of the impact he's seen. First, he was interviewing someone online for a coordinator position. After finishing what he thought was a clever interview, he asked his daughter how he did. She replied, "You were terrible. You didn't ask a single question that would tell you whether that coordinator has a growth mindset or not, which will make all the difference in how progressive she is as a coordinator." He was gobsmacked. She then used ChatGPT to show him how to ask growth mindset questions and what responses would suggest a candidate has or doesn't have a growth mindset. In his second example, he was at a mall with his younger child, who also attends my school. He asked if she was hungry because he was feeling hungry. She responded, "You know why you're feeling hungry? You're looking at the McDonald's sign, and it's yellow and red. Red indicates urgency, and yellow indicates happiness, and together they stimulate your appetite. Let's move away from there and see if you still feel hungry." So, children are now thinking mindfully about the world, how it impacts them, and how they impact the world in return. You can teach very challenging concepts to very young children as long as you scaffold them properly. That's what we do for our teachers. Ismail (29:10) Lina, you have formed several educational entities that have changed the field of schooling. For a young person watching this who wants to change the education field, what advice would you give, or what lessons have you learned in the process? India is not an easy place to build these kinds of business entities or implement reforms—it's a challenging environment. And you also mentioned that you've opened Dream Time Learning in Oman, which has a different kind of culture. What are the lessons you've learned, and what advice would you give to younger people who want to follow in your footsteps? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (29:55) Yesterday, I sat with two investors who were looking at whether they should invest in expanding. We also have micro schools. We've got two micro schools, and we're expanding the micro school concept in India. So they came and they were asking that, they came to work out whether they should invest. And I said, do everything for the right reasons. You have to really love children. You really have to want to make an impact in the world. And you really have to believe that because of what you're doing, the world's going to be a better place when you die. If you're doing it for money, money is a process that happens if I think the intention and the thing are correct. And as Ismail has asked, be very imaginative and be a great storyteller. Because what I do is always so new, I have to be able to tell the stories. When I'm talking to parents, I'm going to have to change because they've already got a cognitive bias and belief about what education looks like. To be able to reform that brain and turn those wheels differently in the parent's brain, I have to be a great storyteller. I've got to tell stories not in an abstract way, but with analogies, examples, and stuff like that. So, for anyone who wants to do it for the right reasons, that is the first thing I'd say. Take a big chart paper or digital board, and first, just write down all the reasons why you want to do it. Why do you want to do education? That's what I told these guys yesterday, if you're doing it and you want to safeguard, because you know, the amount of money they're going to invest, I said that's nothing to you and it's nothing to me. Right? So if you're trying to safeguard that, then you're coming at this all the wrong way. Think of every reason why you want to do this. And is that enough? So when I went to my family, I'd already sold my other business, I'd made money, but we are a family enterprise, so we put everything together, two brothers and myself, and I went to them and the question was this: how much money are you willing to risk as a family for me to have the potential to change the lives of children, education, and possibly the world? So, what question are you asking yourself as to why you want to do this? If you're going to do something that's old school, then don't even do it. Very soon, you'll be redundant. I think today, even Harvard and IITs and everyone are saying, but what's next? What's around the corner? How do we do this? You know, what are we preparing these kids for? I mean, it's no mystery that even if you're a neurosurgeon or just a general surgeon or you're studying medicine, you've gone into your first year of medicine, and by the fourth year, what you've learned in the first year is redundant. That's why I said my book's redundant. Don't buy it. Please don't buy it. It's old. The information and understanding I now have to rewrite the book are completely different. “Drama Teen,” which I wrote, is a better book because I wrote it later, and I'd done a lot more reading in the area of neuroscience. That was my book on bringing people together, and my curriculum is as well. So every chapter, for example, deals with teaching the parent what the child, what the teenager is going through, and then teaching the teenager what they're risking, and therefore bringing them closer together. Because unless you understand who's on the other side of the fence and what they're thinking and why they're thinking, what baggage they have brought to their thinking, what experiences they have brought to their thinking, you can't change their thinking. So, for any entrepreneur wanting to get into education, I just say do it for the right reason. Because then magic happens. When you're doing it for the right reasons, your intention is correct. I'm telling you, the whole universe really does conspire. Ismail (33:23) The other important party in education is the parent. There is an interesting quote in your old book from Hodding Carter: "There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children; one is roots, and the other is wings." It was a nice quote. But if you look at a newspaper these days, it is as if empathy has disappeared from the earth. It's a challenging time for parents as well. So, what advice do you give parents these days? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (34:01) It's only as much courage as a parent has that they can actually make an impact on the child. So we've got to a place where the child is being challenged on all counts. You've got two parents working. Now these parents are feeling guilty. So they over-give to the kids. That's making their kids weaker. It's getting their kids to feel like they can get things from the world without having to work for them. It's not good for their brains or their behavior. Second, we bubble wrap them. Because we're reading these newspaper headlines and we're getting more and more fearful as human beings, we're starting to protect our kids more and more and more. So we're bubble wrapping them. I traveled to Australia by myself when I was 14 years old. I allowed my son to travel to Australia by himself when he was four years old. Unaccompanied minor. Because I knew, and he was ready. So, as a parent, I need to know what my kids are ready for. So, when a parent asks me if I should put my kid in boarding school or not, I say it's not an either/or general question. You really need to know your kid and where your kid's going to thrive the most. And then, therefore, you make sure that you put a child in the environment where it's going to thrive. All I can say to parents is that the future actually belongs to those who dare to learn differently. And the problem I'll tell parents is that the decision is in your hands. So you're going to have to dare to allow them to learn differently. And because only in that differently will they actually be ready for this new world that's around the corner. And we don't know what this world looks like, let's be honest. Nobody knew what was happening in areas of the world would actually happen like that. I don't even think people who voted in favor would have thought that these are some of the outcomes that would happen. We don't know what comes around the corner. The only certainty we have is that there is uncertainty. So, in a world of uncertainty, what are the skills? Like those four types of people, in a world of uncertainty, what skills do you bring to being? So self-regulation is really important. In a world that's really changing, you need to be able to center and regulate. In a world that's really changing, you've got to be a lifelong learner, but then how do you become a lifelong learner? You've got to be excited about learning. So that's what we do. We don't measure, you can't measure whether a kid's a lifelong learner. If I say that as a school, we produce kids who are lifelong learners, come to our school. As a parent, I'd say, How do you measure that? Because the kids left your school and got off. How are you going to measure whether they actually turned out to be a lifelong learner? But if they're excited about learning, if they're deeply curious, and they're excited about learning, you know you've got a lifelong learner. Because learning's not a chore, right? Even on Sundays, I'm learning, because it's like this unearthing of mysteries that the brain loves. Teaching a fact the brain doesn't love. The unearthing of mysteries the brain loves. So, you know, for example, we're teaching Harry Potter, and the kids go, you know, to platform nine and three-quarters, and they disappear through it. We ask them if that is likely to be like a parallel universe, a wormhole. Now they're going into quantum physics, and they're learning about parallel universes. And we'll ask kids who are learning about atoms and molecules and matter, we'll say, could thoughts contain matter? Could thoughts be made up of matter? Now they're going down a rabbit hole of curiosity, and because the greater learning is in the mysteries, it's not in the facts. You know, to open up those mysteries. So yeah, to parents I say, please be brave. Please be more courageous. Please don't be scared of change because the world around your kids is changing so rapidly. Embrace it and dare to help them learn differently. Ismail (37:37) I have a colleague whose son finished a degree overseas, and he asked me to advise his child about the importance of reading. So his concern is, as seen in some of the statistics, that people are not reading these days; even in the school system, or when you complete a degree, there is not as much reading of books. So what do you think? Is this a trend, or is this something we should worry about? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (38:10) So the first thing is this: reading was once something that we feared. I don't know if you know this. Historically, when the technology of the printing press happened, we were scared of kids reading because we thought that it would take away from their memories. But I don't come in education from a place of fear; I come from a place of possibility. So, reading was once the only way we absorbed information. And that's great for a visual learner. But what about if you're an auditory learner? Why don't I let you use an audiobook? Or why don't I let you learn from podcasts? Are you going to learn less from podcasts than you are from a book? Whatever we're talking about could be written in a book. Or somebody could be watching this and get the same amount of information. Or somebody could be listening to it while they're walking in the morning and get the same amount of information. So I never come from a place of fear. I come from a place of possibility. The second thing is, if we want kids to be readers, give them interesting stuff. You know, we're giving kids, we're still giving them Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, when kids don't even know how to handle their emotional states or relationships or anything else. Right? Even if we're teaching Harry Potter or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we make it so relevant and relatable. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we've got these different kids who've been brought up really differently. We actually teach kids parenting styles and what makes for the best parenting style according to research. Then the kids go and study these characters and go back and decode what their parenting style would have been for these kids to turn out like that. Kids who believe that they can flaunt any rule have no respect. When they want something, they will just jump in and grab it. So, we've got to make all of this really relevant and relatable. Parents used to ask me, when I ran Billabong High, if I had comic books in my library, and they would be against that. I said, you know, if your kid picks up a book and reads it, it doesn't matter what it is; the art of engagement is what's important. Now, reading is such a wide thing. Are you talking about fiction or nonfiction? Now, if kids understand that nonfiction or fiction takes them to places of imagination and that the ideas that they get, I mean, and that's just the way we do it, right? So we take, I think it's an old science fiction book. And in it, there's a paragraph. And we give that handout to kids and say, “Read this paragraph and what is it describing?” And they'll say the iPad or the tablet. And I said, Do you know when this book was written? This book was written when these technologies were science fiction. Today, they’re a science fact. So, do you know the power of reading? Because somebody has read that, stored it in their subconscious, whether it was Steve Jobs or whoever else has read that book, stored it in their subconscious, read something else, stored it in their subconscious, and those things then have come magically together to create the tablet, the iPad, the iPhone. Luca Dellanna (40:59) As a closing question, what is one question that you wish podcast hosts asked you about, but you usually don't get the chance to talk about much? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (41:11) Why do I place such an onus on mastery of the self? If everything in this world is about what happens from when the child is born, our jobs as parents are like any other animal in the animal kingdom job, which is, tomorrow, if I die, my child should be better off than today. I've given survival skills, thriving skills, all those skills to my kids before I die. That's my job. That's my job as a parent. If parents actually think of that as a job, then it's fantastic. The second is that I have a saying, and nobody asked me why I say it. I said every human being should feel that their biological child is one of their children, and all the other children of the world are their karmic children. The spiritual children, however you want to put that word. Then we won't see wars. Then we won't see this, you know, policies that are just at odds with each other. Then we won't have the corruption. Because we don't think that way. Because then our education system teaches us to compete, not collaborate. That's where corruption comes from. We use the basis of corruption like Dark Waters, the Teflon story, how somebody, for power and profit, took human lives. He was a murderer. These guys knew what they were doing, and they still went on doing it for commercial gain. What kind of world are we living in? When we're willing to plunder people, we're willing to plunder the planet, we're willing to plunder animals at any cost as long as it gives us money. Does that money buy us happiness? It does not; depression is on the rise in the world. Suicides are on the rise in the world. So we've gone terribly wrong. We should fix it. Ismail (42:55) One final question we ask all guests is for some book recommendations on the theme. I think you mentioned a few of your books as well, the book about mindset. Do you have any? Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (43:08) I'll give you one book that changed my life. It's called "The Biology of Belief." It's by Dr. Bruce Lipton. And it transformed how I see the connection between science and consciousness, science and spirituality, however you want to put it. I'm not religious; when I say spiritual, I'm not coming from any point of religion. But it explores how our thoughts, environment, and beliefs can actually shift our DNA. We think we're born with genetics that we can't shift, but this book gives us insights into how we can actually, through our thinking, through the beliefs we set up, rewire our DNA. Now imagine the power of that for teachers, for educators, for parents. That potential is unlimited. So we've got to move from the confines of a limited curriculum: "This is what we're going to teach at this grade, we're going to teach this, and these are the learning outcomes, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is how we assess and grade, and when you get 99 or a hundred or fail or whatever else." That's prescriptive, and it's very narrow. The world is so vast. So if you can come from teaching from a place of possibility, potential, and hope, it's great. Luca Dellanna (44:21) Thank you so much, Lina. I've really loved this, and it's probably like the video call in which I've been the most emotionally touched, because I also feel so strongly about those topics, and I can see their impact. So, thank you so much for doing what you're doing and for helping others see what's behind it and why it's important. Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (44:44) Thank you so much, Ismail, and thank you so much, Luca. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patternsandstories.substack.com (https://patternsandstories.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   19 Apr 2025

   On Higher Education, with Minerva University founder Ben Nelson

   Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Ben Nelson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennelson3/), the founder of Minerva University (https://www.minerva.edu/), an independent, non-profit educational institution whose classes are conducted as seminars capped at 19 students, who travel to and live together in residential housing in a new country each semester, starting their education in San Francisco, and then living in Seoul, Taipei, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Berlin, and then ending their program in San Francisco. Ben founded Minerva in 2012, and before that, he was the CEO of Snapfish. We will discuss the assumptions of traditional higher education that Minerva challenged. We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna (https://luca-dellanna.com/) and Ismail Manik (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismail-manik-8234179). The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency. Subscribe to be notified of new episodes Highlights: * By the end of summer, after their last year in high school, a typical high school student has forgotten 60 % of what they've learned in three months. It is an outrageous, colossal failure. * In order to know something, you have to actually have space and deliberate practice in applying it. [But what the education system is doing is] the equivalent of trying to teach somebody the violin by letting them listen to the music. Even getting a piano and saying, okay, you know, press this key, press that key, press this key, and now you're done. Now you know how to be, now you're a pianist. And it's kind of absurd. Acquiring knowledge is not the same as the ability to use or deploy that knowledge. * What cannot be replaced by an AI is the learner. Sure, you can easily make the argument that says you can train an AI to deliver content. [...] But what you cannot do is have an AI rewire somebody's neurons, so they learn something they didn't know before. [...] In fact, in an age of AI, when so many of the standard elements are done by the machine, the imperative to know becomes even greater. * If you don't understand the core principles, you're vastly slower. You need more human resources, more brute force. And you can still be beaten by somebody with vastly fewer resources who understands the core down to first principles. * So, how does AI actually improve learning? Well, first and foremost, by enhancing the teacher's capability. * We're finally admitting that there is a deep rot at the core of secondary and post-secondary education, and that the only way to address it isn't with incremental tools for the teachers and professors that are stuck in the system, [but] by ensuring that we are providing an ability to reform the system and therefore uplift teachers, professors, and university and high school administrators to actually reform. And that's the core of what we're trying to do at Minerva. Full transcript: Ismail (00:00) Today, we have Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University, as our second guest on the podcast, Patterns and Stories. Welcome, Ben, to the podcast. I was just going through the book about innovative universities, and there is a chapter dedicated to Minerva, which mentions the pitch you made to Larry Summers. Maybe you could just recount a little bit from that story, where you are, and how Minerva moved and developed. Ben Nelson (00:41) Sure, happy to. For those of you who may not know, Minerva was built as a prototype university – a university that demonstrates to the rest of the world what is possible when you reimagine learning and center it on wisdom or systems thinking, as opposed to this kind of cram for the test, teach the test, pass the test, then everything that was the model traditional universities employ. The premise was to generate the best university in the world, with the best student outcomes, better than Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, but do it from scratch. And I think today, certainly since we've done it and proved that it's possible, and in general, because the collapse in faith in higher education has happened all over the world, today, it doesn't seem like such a crazy idea. Fifteen years ago, it was an absolutely crazy idea. Nobody believed me. People thought I was out of my mind, by and large. And I knew that I needed real, what was known as social proof, right? The ability to demonstrate that it's not just me, that serious individuals would back the idea, back the concept. And there really was no one more prominent in the world of global higher education than Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, former treasury secretary of the United States, a polymath, and brilliant economist. And I did have the opportunity to finally meet him after more than a year of thinking about this idea, being told by almost everybody I met that I was completely crazy. When I met Larry, we had half an hour, and he came in 15 minutes late to the meeting. It was all rushed, but he stayed for two hours, and he finished my sentences. He immediately understood what Minerva was gonna be about. And by the end of the meeting, he said, “Look, this is a great idea that should happen. I'd love to be the chair of your advisory board.” But I didn't have an advisory board. It was just an idea. But it was thanks to that that I could form the advisory board with Larry as the chair. I went out and successfully raised the capital that was necessary to start the university. As one says, the rest is history. Luca Dellanna (03:02) I've seen from some of the other podcasts that you said some interesting things about the pedagogical approach. I think I've heard that, for example, you don't have 101 courses where you teach the basics, because there is an assumption that students can use technology to find it. What are other ways in which you challenged the assumptions of traditional education? Ben Nelson (03:32) Yeah, you know, there are these two core fallacies that exist in the world of higher education. And the first fallacy is that exposure to knowledge equals the acquisition of knowledge. We're perfectly happy saying, hey, here's biology 101, the textbook is this thick, read the entire thing over 15 weeks, we'll administer a final exam, maybe a midterm. You cram that information in your head, you're able to retain it just enough to pass the exam, and now you know it. Well, you don't know it, right? We all know that we all took biology in high school, chemistry, and physics. Almost anybody listening to this podcast who then didn't go on to further study in those fields couldn't pass a high school biology test today. And that's because we simply don't retain information that way, right? In order to know something, you have to actually have space and deliberate practice in applying it. [But what we are doing is the] equivalent of trying to teach somebody the violin by letting them listen to the music. Even getting a piano and saying, okay, you know, press this key, press that key, press this key, and now you're done. Now you know how to be, now you're a pianist. And it's kind of absurd. And so that's kind of a fallacy number one. There's a second and even more dangerous fallacy about education, which is that knowledge and acquiring bits of knowledge are equivalent to a true education or real learning, authentic learning. That's also a fallacy because acquiring knowledge is not the same as the ability to use or deploy that knowledge, right? You know intellectually the difference between correlation and causation. You can study the concept, you can remember it, and you can apply it a few times. It's not a very difficult concept to know. It's really difficult to go around life and encounter all of these correlated events and understand that they may or may not be causal. That's a very hard thing for human beings to actually practice. They see things that wind up being correlated and assume one causes the other. Not necessarily the case. Could be underlying conditions that cause both. It could be unrelated, but just coincidental. It could be that what you actually think is the cause is the effect and not the cause, et cetera. And so there are all sorts of these types of things where you can quote-unquote know something, but you don't know when to deploy it. And that's again, if you want to use the piano example, you could learn to play chopsticks on the piano, very different than being able to do jazz and classical music, very different being able to do rock and roll, very different than being able to do a slow emotional piece versus one that is very fast and technical, one that requires a certain level of humor versus a certain level of seriousness, not to mention as the keyboard itself switches, You know, acoustic versus electronic, having various manufacturers, different timbre, and how to manage that sound. So there's a recontextualization, even in piano playing. Whereas if you think about it, you know, life and the infinite possibilities of applying the various tools that you learn, the imperative to learn knowledge in an applicable way that is applicable to what we refer to in psychology as far transfer and transferable way is really at the heart of what a real education is. And the Minerva model fixes the pedagogical problems that keep individuals from actually acquiring the knowledge that they're exposed to. So it ensures that people actually retain what it is that they learn by and large. Can't retain everything, but a large quantity. They are then able to apply that knowledge, no matter what context they are presented with. Basically, they're learning in a transferable way. Those two areas are perhaps the biggest ways in which we have challenged the orthodoxy of what education is all about. Ismail (08:14) One thing unique [about Minerva] is that there is no comparable kind of institution like that. So the students in Minerva, for the degree programme, study in seven cities. What has been the experience, and how did you manage during COVID? What are the lessons that can be learned from this approach to living in cities, and what is the lesson of it, or what can you learn from it for traditional universities or traditional education institutions? Ben Nelson (08:45) One of the components that you mentioned is the concept of moving from culture to culture. One of the abilities of flexibly applying what you learn is to change context. Minerva courses, though they're done on the web, much like we are now talking via live video, have developed their proprietary platform called Forum, which is indeed managed on the web. And that platform is able to engage with the learner and the professor in unique ways. It also gives a lot of flexibility as to where the students are. When you can take your class from anywhere, it doesn't mean that you have to be stationary for your entire degree. And so we created this, or I created this rotation model, where students go from country to country every semester. And they have this ability through location-based assignments to take what it is that you learn in the formal classroom and not just apply it to the real world, but apply it in these radically different real-world contexts. And that's a part of their education. And that's quite important. Now we know, because they spend their first year in San Francisco, that it is the systems thinking, the foundation that they learn in that first year, which is the biggest delta in their learning. Global rotation is useful, but it is certainly not necessary for human development. It improves; you can do a large bulk of the knowledge acquisition while staying stationary. But you must find other ways of recontextualization. And indeed, in Minerva University, we are not only recontextualized by travel, but we are also recontextualized by giving the same assessments and the same pieces of knowledge as you go from subject to subject, right? So in a history class versus computer science class, when you produce work versus when you critique somebody else's work, when you think spontaneously versus when you have time to deliberate and think, and so forth and so on. And so during COVID, where we were constrained to four cities for two years as opposed to seven, the students traveled a little bit less, but they had different dimensions of transfer in the other components. And so their education was never compromised. And they were able to, during those two-year spans, generally to visit three to four cities, which they would have done anyway. And so it just meant that after COVID, we had to put on the cities that we didn't go to during COVID for a year, and the students kind of caught up. Not everybody was able to catch up with all seven cities, obviously, but certainly the vast majority were visiting at least five. And that's what really mattered. Luca Dellanna (11:46) Thank you. Since you mentioned that you have this platform, Forum, I've heard that one of the things you do is that you also use it to see how the students engage with the courses. How do you use that information to maybe adapt the way the teacher acts? Ben Nelson (12:06) In general, any good technology, of which there are shockingly few, thinks about what the things are that a human being should be able to do in the ideal. Then, they build technologies that enable that ideal. So you can imagine, hey, if I'm running a seminar, I'm trying to teach 12, 15, 18 kids or adults, depending on if you're doing it in high school, if you're doing it in university, if you're doing it in continuing education. What do I want to be able to do as a teacher in science fiction? Forget reality. Again, remember this is 15 years ago when I was initially sketching out the plans for Minerva. And so one of the core things that you want to make sure of is that every single student is engaged at all times. Right? So rather than saying, Oh, let me ask a question of one student at random, and I hope that the other students have done their preparation, or they know the answer. What if you could actually ask all students at the same time? Well, that's actually a relatively easy process. You just ask them to type their response as opposed to saying it. Then, submit, and you can see everybody's thinking. Then, you can call on somebody. You can say, well, if we're having a conversation, having a debate, having a rapid-fire set of questions, how do I ensure that all of the students are actually participating? You can say, well, I guess there's a sound stream. Maybe I can measure the number of seconds that any given person is talking. You can build a technology that would do that, right? And so forth and so on, right? And so what you do is you wind up tooling the digital learning environment to give the professor, if you will, bionic powers, the ability to really understand and look into what everybody is doing. And that is the real value of what we've put together. So, that, to me, is how you build great technology, right? That you don't say, here's a piece of technology. What do I do with it? You say, no, no, no. What is the future state that I want to get to? And then, how do I build technologies to allow us to get to that state? And that's why for since forum debuted 12 years ago, it continues to be the most sophisticated digital learning environment in the world, because it was designed with purpose in mind, as opposed to saying, we have this tool, let's use it in education, right, which is which is where so much of the rest of education technology is has evolved from. Ismail (14:55) One thing, so I was talking to a colleague who is a tutor, he teaches year 12 A-level students, and he was saying that this year he has seen an increase in demand for tutoring. He was saying that one parent told him that the student, his son, uses AI, and he doesn't trust AI. So he thinks that because of AI, his demand has increased. However, AI is present everywhere now. And what do you think AI's role should be in education, in higher education, in secondary education, and teaching? Ben Nelson (15:38) You know, in a recent conference, I was asked just a couple of days ago on a panel, I was asked exactly that question. It was to react to a Bill Gates quote that in 10 years, teachers and doctors may be and will likely be fully replaced by AI. And what are the implications of that? There are all sorts of societal implications. If that occurs, who knows if that'll occur in five years, 10 years, 15 years, or never? I don't try to predict the future. However, what can't be replaced by an AI is the learner. Sure, you can easily make the argument that says you can train an AI to deliver content. You can train the AI to give feedback on how the learner is using the content. You can train the AI to provide emotional support, to read the room, to be able to tailor a new learning experience based on what the student is saying, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you cannot do is have an AI rewire somebody's neurons, so they learn something they didn't know before. So they're able to transfer it to new contexts, so they'll be able to apply it correctly, so they will be able to think about it optimally. In fact, in an age of AI, when so many of the standard elements are done by the machine, the imperative to know becomes even greater. I'll give you an important anecdote. My father, who is a very prominent scientist, a molecular biologist, and a structural biologist, he's in his late 80s and has still published about a dozen papers since COVID. He is extraordinarily active and has been able to, with an extraordinarily limited budget, with one technician, one postdoc or one doctoral student, one master's student and then at a given time beat labs on the same research endeavor that have a fleet, 20 post-docs, know, dozens of student assistants, technicians, et cetera, from the best labs in the world. Why? When my father was learning science, science was vastly more integrated. You didn't know that the field of molecular biology barely existed. And so he understood biology from its very core bases. He really understood why the principles and laws of nature, principles of physics, affected biology. He also mixed his own chemicals. He didn't use kits. There were no kits to use. And so he ran experiments from first principles, constructing them from the base level on up. Now, one oftentimes assumes that automation makes people more productive. But that's not true when it comes to knowledge. Right? It's true that if the kit existed for the particular experiments that my father was doing, right? Then yeah, it would be faster than mixing the chemicals themselves. But the reality is that you have no idea which could be used for what experiment. And if you don't understand the core principles, you're vastly slower. You need more human resources, more brute force. And it's still, you still can be beaten by somebody with vastly fewer resources who understands the core down to first principles. That is a microcosm of what we are in education, or what we're seeing in education today in any field. You can say, Hey, I have an AI, and why do I need to analyze something when the AI can analyze it for me? And that's lovely when there is a correct answer, one correct answer. It's problematic when there are several potential correct answers, when you require judgment, when you don't really know if what the AI produces makes sense or doesn't make sense, or when you have to discern. Right? And so, the imperative to have that artisanal handcrafted ability married with the intuitions that enable you to do so at a speed that is faster than brute force is becoming more and more critical. It's actually one of the reasons why by many measures, the rate of scientific advancement has slowed down over the past couple of decades, especially when you look at practical outcomes, you know, they look at the number of blockbuster drugs that come to market in any given year compared to where they were 40 years ago. It's a remarkable slowdown. And that's an important thing to understand, to understand what it is that is possible around the world of AI. So, how does AI actually improve learning? Well, it does improve learning by first and foremost enhancing the teacher's capability. Again, maybe down the road, you won't even need the teacher. I remain somewhat skeptical about that, but you never know. And again, I don't want to rule anything in or out looking at the future. But for the learner, right, AI must be a tool that, of course, they need to use, of course it's there, must be incorporated into their lessons, but it's gotta be a tool to be used to train the student more rigorously as opposed to less rigorously. That's the orientation that will mark a great use of AI versus a poor use of AI. Luca Dellanna (22:07) Thank you. I love that because I also think that since AI can streamline some parts of the task, it can leave more space to train the judgment. One question I wanted to ask is, you started Minerva with some ideas about what you wanted to change, what the new approach would be, and so on. But what are some new things you discovered that you didn't think of at the beginning, and then as you went on, you discovered? Ben Nelson (22:36) Yeah. One of the things that may sound silly for me not to have thought of ahead of time was, you know, universities are administratively and cost-wise extraordinarily bloated institutions. They spend money on all sorts of ridiculous things in all sorts of ridiculous ways. In fact, one of the reasons you see relatively low public outcry about the admittedly terrible things that are happening to American universities today is that people broadly know that universities are doing a lot of bad things. They may not agree with the tactics that the current government is pursuing. I certainly do not. However, it is hard to defend the practices of the institutions; by and large, they do require vast reforms. And one of those reforms was just being cost-efficient. And indeed, when you look at it, you know I built Minerva initially, and we were able to be a much more streamlined and cost-effective university. Having said that, the price of a hands-on personalized education, especially when you live together, is just the cost of being alive, which is really substantial. And this idea of learning in a physical community, when you are not from that community, meaning when you don't have a home to go to, is a prohibitively expensive endeavor. And, and I was, you know, I think living in the United States living in San Francisco, and say, oh look at all the money that i've seen students take a degree that at the time costed a quarter of a million dollars, they don't know I can chop that in more than half, and look at how much money i'm saving, that's amazing… What I didn't realize is that, whether or not you're spending a hundred thousand or 120,000 versus $240,000 a year, or for the degree, for 98%, 97 % of the human population, you might as well tell them they'll be paying you a hundred million dollars. These are both astronomical numbers that have no bearing on the reality of their circumstance. And so, I think the thing that I really dramatically underappreciated was how challenging, and this is why, you know, Minerva University over the years, I've had to raise so much money to allow anybody that had the merit to be accepted into Minerva University to be able to afford and participate, simply because the costs of living together in a planet community in some of the world's greatest cities was just too high in order to be able to make it effective for the students. And so that to me is still one of those unsolved dilemmas. How do you provide the richness of an in-person learning experience to a diverse student body, to a student body that doesn't all come from the same city or doesn't all come from the same location, how can you crack that problem and ensure that students can experience the world in its richness, experience their colleagues in their varied backgrounds, while not making it cost prohibitive and therefore limiting the number of people to benefit from it? Ismail (26:10) Minerva University offers a degree program. As you have progressed, you have now developed this downstream of higher secondary education. What has been the reason for that, and what do you think is the value added from the baccalaureate or the diploma program that you have? Ben Nelson (26:31) Yeah, so we built a high school program specifically to address some of these earlier issues that we just talked about regarding access. At the university level, one could make the argument that the ideal experience is certainly to leave home, to be in residence, to live together with students, despite the fact that the majority of students around the world don't leave home for university. They actually commute to their university. And so it's certainly not a given that that is the case. High school, on the other hand, is very much flipped. A tiny fraction of learners leave their homes to go to high school or boarding school. The vast majority of high school students around the world, and we're talking about well into the 90s, live at home and then commute to school. So, the idea of bringing systems thinking to that audience can be done at a fraction of the cost. Whereas a university degree that has a residential component that is, robust, et cetera, is very hard to deliver for under a hundred thousand dollars a year, to deliver, to transform a high school education, much of which is paid for by the taxpayer by government sector, not suggesting that there's no underlying cost to it, but to transform it into a Minerva quality systems thinking education costs less than $1,000 a year per student. That's a 99 percent differential in cost. And so it's extraordinarily compelling to be able to bring that quality of an education to that many potential students at a much lower cost. We've developed the Minerva Baccalaureate over the past few years. And just this past year, in 2024, I created a company to spin out of the Maneuver project that will focus on propagating it beyond the pilot program we did in Korea over the past three years, four years now. And now we're bringing the Minerva Baccalaureate to other countries. So we have several schools in Korea that use it. We have a presence in Kazakhstan and Taipei. We're having conversations with schools in half a dozen other countries. And we expect over the coming five to 10 years to really have the Minerva Baccalaureate be a pervasive model of high school education. Ismail (29:06) Can you expand a little bit on how different it is compared to the IB program or the Cambridge A-level? Ben Nelson (29:16) Sure. So, high school programs of any certifiable size, the International Baccalaureate, the Cambridge A-levels, the American Advanced Placement exam, you could put two or three of those out of business, and the world wouldn't notice at all because there's no difference between them whatsoever. You study a subject matter. At the end of some period of study, you sit for a centrally administered test for which you cram and you pass the test, and get a certain grade. And you proceed to forget everything you took on the test. That is not an education. These are anti-educational systems that the vast majority of humanity goes through. And again, we all know this. We all know that when we think back to our high school education, and it's not when we're as old as maybe the three of us are, but people in their twenties cannot remember what it is that they learned in high school. By the end of summer, after their last year in high school, a typical high school student has forgotten 60 % of what they've learned in three months. It is an outrageous, colossal failure. And it's documented to be a colossal failure. And yet these quote-unquote nonprofits generate hundreds of millions of dollars of profit, yet they don't pay taxes in any of their jurisdictions. And they are continuously dismantling the ability for us to educate our students in our schooling environments. The Minerva Baccalaureate is the antithesis to that model. The Minerva Baccalaureate uses the concept of measuring the breadth of application of knowledge as the indicator of true learning. So for the first time, your assessment regimen is connected with what you're actually able to do consistently and across context with what it is that you've learned. What that means is that it is not based on summative tests. It is based on continuous feedback year after year on the same pieces of knowledge, the same cognitive tools that you then apply to different subject matter, to your math studies, to your science studies, to your language art studies, to your history and social studies studies, to your personal growth, to your academic work, to your project work to the work that you create yourself, to the work that you evaluate that others have created, to work that, or to assessments around how you think on your feet, versus assessments to how you think when you've got some real time to put something together, to evaluate when you're asked to apply something versus when you're not asked what expected to. And the Minerva Baccalaureate provides a true index, a true view of the student by having multiple individuals, and now even AI-generated assessments, all contribute to developing a profile of the learner over multiple years. And so it is a radical shift in the assessment, a radical shift in outcomes, which necessitates a curricular reform, which also necessitates a pedagogical reform to ensure that the students are actually learning. And so, the outcomes of the Minerva Baccalaureate provide by far the finest high school education in the world. That's what we are now taking to learners all over the planet. Ismail (32:46) Then you worked with a lot of new universities that are coming up, especially in emerging countries. What trends do you see emerging globally that excite you? Where do you see the trends? Is there any difference between, say, emerging countries, the Gulf, Latin America, or even Europe? What do you see as the trends? Is this change happening, or how do you see the vibe? Is the vibe changing, kind of? Ben Nelson (33:17) It's an excellent question. The reality is that we have all known individually that the emperor has had no clothes for decades. No one is under the illusion that what they do day to day, their job, their efficacy, they learned in university or high school. We all know that those are certifications that we needed because they were some kind of signal. Sure, you know, we may have learned bits of information. Sure, we had a great time. We made friends. Sure, we had opportunities for internships. We did some interesting research. Maybe we built some great things and gave ourselves some training. But by and large, we know that the classes that we took could have been achieved by watching the videotape, right? And we wouldn't have been worse off, or significantly worse off. And so the difference is that finally, certainly after decades of this having occurred, certainly after 15 years of us shouting at the top of rooftops all over the world that he emperor has no clothes. We're finally talking about it out loud. We're finally admitting that there is a deep rot at the core of secondary and post-secondary education, and that the only way to address it isn't by incremental tools for the teachers and professors that are stuck in the system, right, that can't traverse the problems, the institutional problems that the system has, and not by admonishing the administrators that are similarly incapable of fixing what is the large systematic problem. It is by ensuring that we are providing an ability to reform the system and therefore uplift teachers, professors, and university and high school administrators to actually reform. And that's the core of what we're trying to do at Minerva. Luca Dellanna (35:15) I wanted to ask one last question: How do you uplift teachers at scale? What do you see as the path forward to do that, at the scale of a nation, for example? Ben Nelson (35:28) Yeah. In some ways, national-level reforms are the easiest. You know, again, you can imagine somebody going back to 18th-century France and going to the court of Louis and saying, Look, you believe that draining bad humors is the way to cure diseases. Here's the evidence. It's a sugar pill, right? It's a placebo. Sure, it works for some people, but so would giving them a sugar pill. And here is this thing called an antibiotic, right? And in most cases, the antibiotic will be three times more effective at curing a bacterial infection than this placebo is in the court of, of, of the Kings of France, that would, even if you were to convince the court, you know, the, the, process of bloodletting would have been extinct pretty quickly. In fact, when penicillin and antibiotics were discovered, their rollout was very fast. When vaccinations were discovered, they were very quickly widespread. We know what works in education; there is no mystery as to what works in education, and because of that, governments would incorporate authentic assessments, right? They could easily scale that to every school and university in their country. The Minerva Baccalaureate, for example, is ready and willing to have any government in the world adopt it or a version of it that we can work with them on, takes the boldness to say that the emperor has no clothes out loud, and then to do something about it. Ismail (37:27) And one final question on my side, we asked our guests on the podcast about this recommendation on books to understand the education issue. We certainly recommend your book. You wrote it with Kosslyn on building the intentional university and the new global universities, which have a chapter devoted to Minerva. Do you have any recommendations on trying to understand? Ben Nelson (37:59) You certainly took the two recommendations that I would have. If you really want to understand not only what we did to build the nervous system but also how new universities are created in general, I would highly recommend picking up those two books. Luca Dellanna (38:14) Thank you so much, Ben. It's been incredibly instructive, and I really believe, not just in Minerva, that there is a big need for reform. It's such an opportunity cost and waste right now, and we could, I don't know if people see how much better the world could be if we took education more seriously. So, thank you very much. It was really great. Thank you for giving us your precious time. Ben Nelson (38:45) Thank you for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patternsandstories.substack.com (https://patternsandstories.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    13 Apr 2025

    Peter Eigen on Fighting Corruption

    Welcome to the first episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International (https://www.transparency.org), a non-governmental organization fighting corruption with national chapters in over 100 countries. Peter founded Transparency in 1993, and before that, he worked at the World Bank. We will discuss the challenges of fighting corruption and what citizens can do about it. We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna (https://luca-dellanna.com) and Ismail Manik (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismail-manik-8234179). The transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency. Highlights “I wanted to set up a system where all the suppliers stop bribing simultaneously, and nobody would lose from that. I pushed this as a proposal within the World Bank, [...] and it didn't work at all because the countries which are the owners of the World Bank, like Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and so on, said you cannot get any business in the international market if you don't bribe.” “Even the vice president for Africa said, yeah, we are going to do that. But he ran very quickly into the opposition of the owners of the World Bank, of the shareholders, who wanted their companies to continue to be allowed to bribe internationally. [...] I was not convinced anymore that it was really the corrupt African leaders who were demanding the bribes, but it was at least as much the corrupt suppliers who were offering the bribes from the North.” “If you leave it to the government to control corruption, it will be very hard to be successful. [...] The better solution is if one gets together a civil society and organizes something like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, or Save The Children. This is where citizens get together to promote something that, to some extent, is supposed to help society as large but which the government is very often not able to supply. [...] It's important to get these citizen groups together and join them in a discourse with the government and the private sector in a given situation. And on that basis, you can change things.” “[In Germany], until 1999, [companies bribing foreign governments] would get a tax write-off. They could declare this a useful expense.” “We don't see ourselves as a transparency initiative, as an organization that chases individual corruption cases. We are doing that also if it is necessary for our mandate to change the system. But the main thing is we want to change the system.” “There was one firm, the firm Bosch, know, the big electric firm, which lent us, for instance, their boardrooms for our sessions in Stuttgart, which supported our way. But they didn't want to mention this because they felt ashamed. They were embarrassed that they didn't bribe, you know, because the others, their competitors, thought they had to bribe because otherwise they wouldn't get contracts. So, it was very strange to build up a system of support.” “We don't want to change the whole world from one day to the other, but we want to create certain situations, say, the road sector of Uganda or the health sector in Ghana or so. And we would say in that sector we try honesty, [and] we allow everything else to continue. We are not going to name and shame corrupt people. If you find out about it to the contrary, we try to become friends with the companies, in particular the multinational corporations. [...] Eventually, we convinced them through this integrity pact, which we eventually developed into a legal system where we would ask people who bid for a certain contract to enter into a triangular contract with civil society and with the government in which they promised not a single penny of corruption will be allowed in this contract. In particular, civil society was empowered to look at the books and so on, look at the bids, look at the bid evaluation. [...] We convinced various presidents to introduce the Integrity Pact in their bidding documents whenever they borrowed from the World Bank. But the World Bank didn't allow it.” “One of the most important principles of Transparency International is that this has to be handled by the countries themselves and their people. And so, the main strength of Transparency International is the national chapters.” “Our second mantra basically [is] that we have to get the main stakeholders together [civil society, the private sector, and the government] in a given situation with their interests and let them present their interests and confront them with their interests of the other two. [...] This multi-stakeholder process, which brings the three actors, government, civil society, and private sector together, has become sort of my golden key to better governance.” “[Our third mantra is to] try to stay away from getting involved in individual cases of corruption too much. [...instead,] our organization should try to build a coherent, systemic approach to corruption. And I think we have shown that this can succeed.” Full Transcript Part I: the birth of Transparency International Peter Eigen (00:36) Thank you very much. It's a great honor for me to speak to you and Luca. Indeed, it's been a long time since we met, but it's even longer since I started to feel very uncomfortable with what I saw in many of the World Bank projects. I saw the decisions that were taken by governments that borrowed money from the World Bank in order to promote big projects, pipelines, railways, schools, hospitals, and so on. They very often made the wrong decisions, and we didn't quite understand why. It became quite clear to me when I was still the division chief for some Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, and so on, but even more when I became the director of the regional office in Kenya, that there were some arrangements made by the decision-makers in the borrowing countries with the suppliers to take the wrong offers – even when we told them this was too expensive, it was not the right thing to do right now to build a big highway. I have become more and more uncomfortable with the decision-making process in some of our borrowing countries. Of course, I totally accepted that the governments who borrow from the World Bank, it's their business; it's the politics and the culture and so on of their country and the social needs which they have to take into account when they are taking the money of the World Bank. But we also wanted to see that our projects succeed, and therefore, it became quite a worry for me when I saw that very often projects were promoted, which we didn't quite understand. And so I began to talk to suppliers from Germany, the United States, Japan, France, and the UK and I asked them. They said, well, in Africa, but also in Latin America and Asia, if you want to get contracts, you have to bribe people. And I said, well, but then they make wrong decisions. I was in charge of the legal department many years ago, in 1967, when I joined the World Bank. I was in charge of the procurement guidelines, and international procurement was very much part of the gospel of the World Bank. So when we gave a loan of several hundred million dollars, and they were then contracted out to build big pipelines or railways or road systems, we wanted to get the biggest buck for the dollar, you know, and therefore, we followed very closely the competitive procedures and then the comparison of various offers. I understood more and more, and that was in 1988, 1989, and 1990 when I was in Kenya, that things couldn't be quite successful because the wrong decisions were taken and probably based on corruption. So, I asked the World Bank basically to help me follow up on these rumors and stories of corruption. I asked the people who were building big projects in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, or any of these East African countries what happened. And they said, well, look, this is necessary. I mean, these ministers, these presidents, they demand it. And if you don't give them money, we don't get the contracts. This is why I started to propose something (because I also thought it was a great shame that these wonderful companies were forced to bribe) to start some kind of a cartel of the honest. Therefore, I called it the business practice monitor, and I wanted to set up a system where all the suppliers stop bribing simultaneously, and nobody would lose from that. I pushed this as a proposal within the World Bank, so as part of the World Bank's procurement guidelines, there was some self-fulfilling requirement that nobody pay any bribes. And it didn't work at all because the countries which are the owners of the World Bank, like Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and so on, said you cannot get any business in the international market if you don't bribe. And I said this is impossible. The Americans have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. (In fact, unfortunately, the application of the Foreign Cross Practices Act in the United States was just suspended by President Trump.) So, this was for me the example. Jimmy Carter had started the Foreign Cross Practices Act, basically after the Watergate scandals, and made sure that no American citizen or American company was allowed to bribe abroad. And I must say this was a very courageous step. The companies didn't like it because they saw that the Germans, the French, and the Brits were allowed to continue to bribe. They had expected that everybody stopped at the same time. But others have said that it's good that Americans cannot bribe: then, it becomes easier for us to get contracts. So, this was basically the situation that I found. Therefore, I wanted to start this business practice monitor, where every supplier who wants to bid for a World Bank contract had to commit that they all would simultaneously stop bribing. But this was not accepted by the Bank. And, of course, the Bank was very much under the influence of the countries that were the owners. The Americans would have loved to support me. However, Americans had only 15 % of the votes in the bank at the time. So the other countries like Germany had 6%, France 6%, Japan 6%, and many African countries had less than 1%. So, it was simply a decision of the bank that I was not allowed to introduce that system. And I was very unhappy. I had a couple of friends in Kenya I met regularly, for instance, with a wonderful accountant whom I met once every week. His name was Joe Githongo, and he was one of the Kenyans who then started to work with me when we had a retreat in Swaziland with all the resident representatives of the World Bank in Africa. I was invited to give a speech to my colleagues, which I wrote together with Joe Githongo because I didn't want to pretend to give moral lessons to Africa, so I rather wanted to do that with an African friend. The two of us presented a paper, which everybody accepted. I mean, all the other resident representatives of the World Bank and other countries thought it was a great thing. Even the vice president for Africa said, yeah, we are going to do that. But he ran very quickly into the opposition of the owners of the World Bank, of the shareholders, who wanted their companies to continue to be allowed to bribe internationally. So that became quite a fight. Within Germany, I had a couple of friends at the GTZ, as it was called at the time, which is the main technical assistance arm of the German development assistance. Their leadership was totally on my side, but the minister and also the government at large were totally against it. They said, we would lose our position as the world champions of exporters in Germany if we were not allowed to bribe anymore. And so, to make a long story short, I was asked by my management to either stop that, to go after the corruption, or I had to leave the bank. I was very fortunate that I had just reached the time when I could retire. So I took retirement, and in 1991, I went to Berlin and called all my friends whom I had earlier discussed this matter with, including people in Latin America, but also in Africa, and about two years later, we had a big conference in which we set up Transparency International. I changed the name because I was not convinced anymore that it was really the corrupt African leaders who were demanding the bribes, but it was at least as much the corrupt suppliers who were offering the bribes from the North. So, to put the whole burden of reform on the people from the North [LDA: South?] would have been wrong. And therefore, basically, we called it Transparency International. There were other offers; some people wanted to call it Integrity International and other things, but I was able to prevail because transparency is such a wonderful term. It only describes something, the situation in which better governance happens, know, if transparency prevails. So, that was basically the story at the time. I can go on and on, and it was a wonderful, wonderful story for me because I got a lot of support from many people all over the world. I mean, even at the launch meeting in Berlin in 1993, we already had a former Minister of Finance of Ecuador, and we had very powerful sector people joining us. I had Obasanjo there; he was the president of Nigeria, and at the time, he was running an NGO in Nigeria. So he came and helped us. It was a fantastic meeting that also combined a lot of international civil servants from the United Nations, Transparency International, Amnesty International, and other NGOs. So, at that time, we gradually formed the idea to set up Transparency International, and I must say I'm very proud that we managed to get it going. Part II: Citizen action Luca Dellanna (11:00) What can normal citizens do if they want to reduce corruption in their country? Peter Eigen (11:10) I feel very strongly that if you leave it to the government to control corruption, it will be very hard to be successful. If you leave it to the companies, it's also very hard to succeed because the temptation to pay a little bribe and get hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and so on is tremendous. Therefore, you need other actors, and the individual citizens, of course, are not very powerful. I mean, if you are asked by a policeman in the street in Kenya or the Maldives, know, and he says, “I give you a ticket because you are parked wrongly,” and you say, “No, I'm not parked wrongly,” [and he replies,] “Yeah, but I think it looks very wrong what you park, but if you give me $10, then I can forget about it.” I mean, these situations are so easy, and the temptation to pay is great. And maybe it's the only solution. But the better solution is if one gets together a civil society and organizes something like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, or Save The Children. This is where citizens get together to promote something that, to some extent, is supposed to help society as large but which the government is very often not able to supply. Therefore, I'm a great believer in bringing together government, civil society, and the private sector to agree that, for instance, corruption is very damaging to everybody. If there is corruption in the transport sector in Africa, all the transport companies that are trying to do business here will suffer from it. And so, in many ways, it's important to get these citizen groups together and join them in a discourse with the government and the private sector in a given situation. And on that basis, you can change things. I mean, if you look back at Transparency International, for instance, in 1999, the legislation in Germany was changed. Basically, they now have a law, like the United States' Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that says that a German company that is caught bribing somebody in Africa will be punished in Germany. In the past, until 1999, [companies bribing foreign governments] would get a tax write-off. They could declare this a useful expense, like Werbungskosten, as you say in Germany. And you would tell the Ministry of Finance had to pay $10 million to the president, so and so, in and such a country. And you can prove it, you show them the receipt, and then you could deduct that from the taxable income rather than being punished, you know. This is amazing. So, how did we get there? I think it's a combination of a number of things. I mean, one which is very important to us [is that] we don't see ourselves as a transparency initiative, as an organization which is chasing individual corruption cases. We are doing that also if it is necessary for our mandate to change the system. But the main thing is we want to change the system. And that's what happened in Germany. But it took a very long time. We had very close connections with a number of big companies. Many of them didn't want to be mentioned because they said we don't want to show off in front of the others who are bribing, but we are not bribing, and we support you. I mean, for instance, there was one firm, the firm Bosch, know, the big electric firm, which lent us, for instance, their boardrooms for our sessions in Stuttgart, which supported our way. But they didn't want to mention this because they felt ashamed. They were embarrassed that they didn't bribe, you know, because the others, their competitors, thought they had to bribe because otherwise they wouldn't get contracts. So, it was very strange to build up a system of support. We were successful eventually with the government; we were successful with governmental institutions and development institutions. But it took very long, in the World Bank, to convince them. It took basically until Jim Wolfenson joined the World Bank – which was 1995. At that time, we saw a chance because we had heard that he was very much against corruption privately. And, in fact, it was a very nice story. He was a musician, and I played clarinet, and he played cello. And so he said, I'm coming to Bonn to talk to all the NGOs in Germany. Ismail Manik (15:44) I think he got an Olympic medal. Peter Eigen (15:50) Yeah, right. I don't know whether you are interested in that story, but we basically convinced him that he should turn the World Bank into an anti-corruption agency. And that's what he did. It took us a couple of years. I had to basically commute back to the World Bank many, many times. And eventually, we got the World Bank to become one of the strongest agencies against corruption in the international area. So, Germany accepted this. I mean, the German vote in the World Bank, the 6 % voting power they had at the time, helped us. The Americans voted in favor of it. And very soon, the Brits and the French and so on joined. Eventually, the World Bank became a very strong partner in fighting corruption. Ismail Manik (16:41) I think Wolfensohn's speech, "Cancer of corruption," was a turning point for the World Bank. But I think your decision to leave earlier from the bank was also a very courageous decision. And what do you think was the tipping point that kind of moved this work to the forefront of anti-corruption efforts within the multilateral? Part III: Changing the system, not fighting individual cases Peter Eigen (17:10) I think one of the best ideas we had briefly before the launch in 1993 was to create what we call the Integrity Pact. I mean, we call that also at the conference, we call that the island of integrity, where we said we don't want to change the whole world from one day to the other, but we want to create certain situations, say, the road sector of Uganda or the health sector in Ghana or so. And we would say in that sector we try honesty, [and] we allow everything else to continue. We are not going to name and shame corrupt people. If you find out about it to the contrary, we try to become friends with the companies, in particular the multinational corporations. So, I worked very closely with Siemens, for instance. Siemens had its headquarters in Erlangen for a while. That's where I grew up. The then director general of Siemens was a close friend of mine, and we played tennis together and so on. So, we tried to become friends with the big companies. And we were friends with Bosch, but we found it very hard to become friends with Siemens. Eventually, we convinced them through this integrity pact, which we eventually developed into a legal system where we would ask people who bid for a certain contract to enter into a triangular contract with civil society and with the government in which they promised not a single penny of corruption will be allowed in this contract. In particular, civil society was empowered to look at the books and so on, look at the bids, look at the bid evaluation. And in fact, we introduced this in many, many countries. Robert McNamara, who was the president of the World Bank for a long time, fell in love with that formula. So, he traveled with me to various African countries, and we convinced various presidents to introduce the Integrity Pact in their bidding documents whenever they borrowed from the World Bank. But the World Bank didn't allow it. In fact, they still felt that if you have free international bidding, you could not interfere. You couldn't impose any conditions. So you would have to allow whatever they do. In particular, you don't interfere with their politics; you don't interfere with their cultural system. So if, in a certain country, corruption is part of the deal, then the World Bank has no business in getting involved. So, for a while, I had strong supporters like Obasanjo, like Jan Prong, who was a minister of the Netherlands, and so on. I eventually managed to introduce this integrity pact in many, many big contracts. I mean, even in Germany, for instance, our airport in Berlin had to be re-bid completely after about four years of preparations because they had a lot of corruption. And therefore, the managers of the suppliers came to us and said, “Why don't we introduce the integrity pact?” And we did. And now it's a wonderful airport here in Berlin. So, this is one tool that we still use. For instance, in Pakistan, it's very widely used. And in many countries, we are trying to do this at every level. It can even be, say, in the school system, where you say the teachers agree with the parents and the students not to take bribes when they admit people to the school or something like that. So it can be very small, it can be huge, you know. And I think the Integrity Pact has been one of the keys to getting the support of Germany, the UK, France, and so on. Ismail Manik (20:56) I think the World Bank is having, maybe starting yesterday, a major conference on anti-corruption. One of the keynotes was given by Daron Acemoglu, who talked about the link between institutions and efforts. Also, I think the World Bank has renamed the governance departments as institution departments. What would be your advice to the participants of this conference that is happening by major stakeholders on global multilateral efforts to address this issue from your experience? Peter Eigen (21:36) Well, I must say that one of the most important principles of Transparency International is that this has to be handled by the countries themselves and their people. And so, the main strength of Transparency International is the national chapters. I mean, you have a fantastic national chapter in the Maldives. Italy has a strong chapter, too. In Germany, we have thousands of members in our chapter. Some of the chapters, like those in Bangladesh, have 12,000 supporters. In Argentina, they have 6,000 members and so on. It's basically a massive people's movement of partly experts or partly also people who are suffering from corruption, either because they work in a big company where they have to bribe, I mean, they are told to bribe, you know, and if they don't bribe, they are fired, you know. Or people in governments who are used to taking bribes, and they're distributed to their superiors, and they have the same constraint. So, some systems are so corrupt that it's very hard to change things. We plan to release more episodes soon. Subscribe to get notified of them. Part IV: The Multi-Stakeholder Approach Therefore, I believe very strongly in the second part, our second mantra basically, that we have to get the main stakeholders together in a given situation with their interests and let them present their interests and confront them with their interests of the other two. And that is civil society, the private sector, and the government. So, when the government says, we have to do that, we need money, and so on because otherwise, we don't have enough income, so then they tell the others, then the others will say, but then you build hospitals which are crooked, or you build roads which nobody needs and so on. So we all suffer from that. And so all three stakeholders have their own ideas, their own needs, their own interests, and they have to be brought together, not only once for a meeting or so, for [the] integrity pact, but they have to stay together and look for a respectful and professional dialogue in which they compare these different interests and come to compromises. That has become my main recommendation over the years. I mean, it's on the one hand that every country, every society has to develop its own fight against corruption. We should not try to handle that from Berlin, Rome, or somewhere else. And we should rather empower people in the countries. And that we can do [this] by supporting the movements of civil society and their freedom of acting. On the other hand, if once we have that, we should then go for this multi-stakeholder process whenever it is possible. I mean, I'm still doing this right now. You know, when I left Transparency International, I started the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative. And that is a typical example where the mining companies have the same voting power as the governments and the civil society organizations. So, in their charter, which is an association of Norwegian law that I helped to set up at the time, each of the three stakeholders has equal voting power. So, all their decisions, all their values, and all the positions they take internationally are carried out by a compromise of these three actors. And, of course, the mining companies want to make as much money as possible and do not want to have to clean up afterward, and so on. And they want to, if possible, hide their income so they don't have to pay too much taxes and so on and so on. And which is partly legitimate. But the civil society says, no, I mean, we live here in this village, we want to have a fair share of the income and so on. So, I mean, this multi-stakeholder process, which brings the three actors, government, civil society, and private sector together, has become sort of my golden key to better governance. But of course, I mean, your question goes a little bit deeper. I mean, what do you do when everybody is corrupt? When your institution is corrupt, how can you, as an individual, make a contribution? There, one simply has to be smart, you know, and try to develop a strategy that will eventually change things. I mean, I was, for instance, we had a terrible thing with the UN Convention against Corruption to get that ratified in Germany. Because the deputies, the members of the Bundestag, said, look, if we assign that, if that is ratified in Germany, we cannot take any money anymore from our constituencies. We cannot talk to them. We cannot support their needs and so on. So, this makes it impossible to be an effective parliamentarian. So, they refused to ratify this. Germany was one of the last countries to ever ratify the UN Convention against Corruption, which was a fantastic achievement of the 160 countries that signed this in Merida, Mexico, with our support and our tremendous presence at the time. A multi-stakeholder approach is, for me, the second most important issue. The third one is to try to stay away from getting involved in individual cases of corruption too much. I mean, we had some problems with some chapters in Zimbabwe; for instance, they wanted to go after corrupt ministers and so on. And I said, don't do that. I mean, try to support if others are doing it. But our organization should try to build a coherent, systemic approach to corruption. And I think we have shown that this can succeed. Luca Dellanna (27:33) Peter, this approach is so important and so different from what other people would sometimes think. I'm sure that if you asked me a few years ago, I would have been like, oh, we should prosecute the individual cases, cannot work with them, completely the opposite. And I think it's so important now to hear about this, especially to hear that it worked. On this, I was wondering if you think that this approach of working with parties that, at first sight, look adversarial, trying to find solutions where everyone is willing to work together, would also apply to contexts other than corruption. I'm thinking, for example, about some environmental issues or some other social issues. Do you know if there are other organizations in other fields that have started using the same approach? Peter Eigen (28:23) That is a very interesting question. In fact, I can tell you about a present effort which I'm making. I was part of Kofi Annan's Africa Progress Panel for 10 years. In 2017, we found out that about 600 million Africans don't have access to electricity. 600 million! I mean, these are when the children come home from school, cannot, and the sun goes down, they don't see anything. They can't learn. The women cannot cook with electricity. They cook with charcoal, and the mortality of women in Africa is, therefore, much [higher] than everywhere else in the world. So 600 million people don't have a fridge, you know, where a health post can keep some medicines and so on. So he said, we have to do something about it. And so there are a lot of people who have good inventions in solar and other sustainable energy sources. But then there are others who have good ideas about how to invest and how to pay for decentralized electrification. But in many of the villages, the people don't really agree on what the rules should be if you have a decentralized energy source. And so what we are focusing on is to improve the enabling environment in villages in Senegal. [There are] 16 villages where the Senegalese have created, with our support, multi-stakeholder groups in which the local mayor, perhaps a local chief, perhaps some government officials, perhaps a sawmill owner who needs electricity, perhaps some kettle posts who need some electricity and so on, meet with civil society organizations in these villages and they discuss the rules of the game, you know, who is in charge of spare parts, we bring in a decentralized off-grid electricity solution, who takes care of the fees which have to be paid, how high do the fees have to be? Can they be higher than in the cities, when everybody just has to plug something into the wall, you know, and then they have electricity when they live near a line or so, and so on. In other words, we create multi-stakeholder groups in these villages, and they create a stable environment in which other people then begin to invest, basically, in off-grid electricity. This is happening in Senegal, and we are trying to expand this to other countries in Africa. You may have heard that the new president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, has promised that he will, until [by?] 2027, supply electricity to 400 million Africans. So, he is trying to do the big sort of World Bank-type thing. But I think he needs us because he needs to bring into the villages a government understanding of who will run this and what the rules will be so that you can attract private investments, for instance, in the villages. I tried to use this in the fisheries sector. In Mauritania, we created a similar thing for local fisheries called the FiTI Fisheries Transparency Initiative. And it had its office in the Seychelles, run by Sven Biermann, who used to work for us here in Berlin. Basically, this has now quite a number of African coastal countries and Latin American countries to create governance, good governance through multi-stakeholder processes, where the fishermen say what they need, know, say what the government has to do, how they can avoid giving huge concessions agreements to, say, the Chinese fishing fleets or the Spanish fishing fleets which fish all the fish away. I mean, if you go to Senegal to the beach, you will see at the beach, you see one boat next to the other and the fishermen sitting around because they can't find any fish anymore. So, I mean, we have created this for fisheries. I've tried to do it for the Lieferketten, as we call it in Germany; this is a supply chain, for instance, in the garment industry. But, we didn't succeed with this because my concept of trying to create multi-stakeholder efforts in the producing countries was not followed by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation. Instead, they forced importers, German importers, to only import if the production was fair and humane, you know, no child labor, no harassment of women, no slave labor, and so on. Of course, they are right; the Lieferkettengesetz in Germany was right, but it couldn't be enforced by simply telling a German importer that if you import something from Bangladesh, you have to make sure that there is no child labor in the factories and so on. I mean, for that, you need a multi-stakeholder process. So this is what my approach is in many other areas and others. My wife does this in German cities, where there are fights about certain decisions on urban development and so on. She brings together civil society, the private sector, and the government to discuss what the best solution is. And in 10 cities here in Germany, she has found solutions for intractable problems through multi-stakeholder processes. So I'm very much convinced of this, Ismail, and I'm trying to preach this, not so at TI, you know, whenever we were successful with Transparency International, it was based on multi-stakeholder processes. Whenever we were able to explain to everybody that it was in their interest to stop bribing, and then they agreed to simultaneously behave, we were successful in any context, whether it was in Asia, Latin America, Africa, or Europe. Part V: The role of the academy Ismail Manik (34:31) One key stakeholder is the academic order. A lot of bureaucrats go to train in these public policy schools, such as LSE, Columbia, Harvard, or MPA. What do you think? I had a look at some of the course syllabi on how they teach corruption. What would be your suggestion? When you're training government bureaucrats and public policy students, what should be taught to them? What would be your syllabus in a sense? Key things that you would want them [to know] when they go back to their country. Peter Eigen (35:08) Yeah, well, again, this is a very good question, Ismail, because most people know that corruption is bad. And so, one must also teach them approaches to trying to create systems that make it very hard for corrupt people to indulge in corruption. After I left TI, I taught at Harvard for two semesters myself, and some of the people who were in my classes became very powerful, and even some of the professors were affected by my work. So, this is a very important way of promoting the idea that corruption is not only bad but harmful and that there are ways of dealing with it. And what you have sent me [in an email before this interview] as a teaching guideline is extremely interesting. These are very powerful tools that are being taught there. You also sent me something from Danny Kaufmann. I mean, he is extremely effective. He was at the EDI, at the Economic Development Institute, for a long time while I had left the bank, but we were extremely close because I also had been in charge of Chile for a long time. So, he set up a wonderful chapter in Chile. And we worked very, very closely. And in fact, he is still continuing his work. He's writing and speaking and so on, and very proud that he is still doing that. But it is something which should be perhaps also done by practitioners, know, I mean people like you who have worked in this field, they should convey what we learn, you know, in a given situation and what can be helpful. I think it is [a] very fragile good luck. In a society, if you are not corrupt, you know, we have seen many countries that were basically quite clean and were doing better in the corruption perception index, but also in this state capture index of Danny Kaufmann and so on. But then, suddenly, it all turns around again. For us, for instance, Trump suspending the application of the Foreign Craft Practices Act is an amazing thing. I mean, we admired America that they had done that, even though they were suffering from it. I mean, General Electric and some of the big electronic companies were always complaining that the others were bribing and so on. And so we admired America for what they have done. And to just throw this out is such an amazing breach of decency and good governance. It's amazing. We are very concerned about that. But it shows how fragile it is. It also shows that you can change it. I mean, in Germany, they are prosecuting quite a number of companies right now under something that is now similar to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States. So it's basically the other way around. So, we used to admire the Americans. The French thought that we were more or less the lackeys of the CIA, you know, because we were introducing anti-corruption. We had to defend ourselves and say that we were independent. And now it's the other way around, you know. Now, our people in America have to be very careful that they will not be punished, you know. So it's a very mixed feeling, and I'm sorry that I can't be more optimistic at this time. Ismail Manik (38:40) I think one thing from my personal experience, one thing that mattered, so when we joined the government, and there were our ministers when we joined, they were very good mentors, and they were people with remarkable integrity type of people have become kind of an endangered species these that are mentoring when somebody joins the public sector, that element is, I think, a very important factor. Part VI: Individual Reflections One final question I have: what keeps you waking up at night, and what advice would you give a young person who wants to study addressing these corruption issues and sometimes loses hope; what advice would you give to young people who want to be involved in this kind of work? Peter Eigen (39:33) Well, I mean, I'm a very fortunate person. I had reached a point after 25 years of faithful work in the World Bank where I could leave with a slightly reduced pension. And so I did this, but I was still very young. I was 55. And so I wanted to use what I had learned in the bank and my energy and so on to do something useful. And, of course, Transparency International was something that was better than anything I could dream of. And I still have an office at the International Secretariat. I don't have a secretary. In fact, whenever somebody wants me to do something, then they have to do the secretarial work for me. So I was sent to Mongolia, for instance, for two weeks. And so, everything had to be paid by TI. I talked to various ministers in Mongolia and wrote a long report, and I interacted with them on how to implement it. But then, unfortunately, the main counterpart, who was very good and was a minister of justice, became the mayor of the capital of Mongolia, so he had nothing to do with it anymore. Perhaps he still has something to do with it, but there was no real follow-up on my visit. You know, it's beautiful for me. I met a lot of young and wonderful people like Ismail. A week ago, I was at the beach with my wife in Kenya, and we met a lot of people who knew us. And it's a wonderful thing, you know. But also, of course, it is something that is really an obligation of somebody who has so much learned, has such a big network, has so many possibilities of speaking up, and so on. So this is why this is all very exciting. By the way, also for my wife, who's, as you may know, also politically very active. She was a presidential candidate in Germany twice, and to my great delight, she lost. Otherwise, I would be the first lady right now. [Laughs.] Part VII: Technology Ismail Manik (41:41) And one final thing, I mean, we have to talk about technology, how it's changing. What is your view? How can we use it? Is it an opportunity in the age of AI, and do you think it is empowering things? It gives more agency, I guess, to those who are fighting corruption. What are your thoughts on this? Peter Eigen (42:01) Absolutely. Unfortunately, it is also a very good tool for corrupt people. So, I mean, they can shift billions of dollars within seconds around from one capital mark to the other, and so on. So, the anti-corruption community has to be very good at artificial intelligence, as much as we have to be good at all the other tools and weapons that we have against crime and destruction in society. So, I'm personally probably too old to get too much mileage out of it. I was always very much interested when I was the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi. I was one of the first to interact with the headquarters with this kind of stuff, you know, give up the telegrams you used to send back and forth. Right now, I'm not really completely up to date with artificial intelligence, but I hope that our younger colleagues who are fighting corruption follow that very closely and fight very hard for better governance with these new tools. Conclusions Luca Dellanna (43:24) Thank you so much, Peter. I really loved this because I found your example so inspiring, and it’s also inspiring that it's possible to bring people together. I've learned so much about the multi-stakeholder approach. It's so different from what you hear a lot of people proposing, but it's effective. And for me, that's the number one takeaway from today, that it's less about focusing on individual cases and more about trying to change the system in a way in which everyone is willing to change it. So, thank you so much. I've just learned so much, and I'm so impressed with you and with Transparency International. Peter Eigen (44:02) I want to thank you for giving me such a wonderful possibility to spread the word all around the world. Thanks for reading Patterns and Stories! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit patternsandstories.substack.com (https://patternsandstories.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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