114. The Humanitarian Ape

Gareth Owen (: 00:00

A very declining post-industrial humanitarian landscape that's got itself into a real pickle and I think is increasingly dissociated from itself, but also from wider society. And that's something that it can't be done institutionally, that restoration process has to be much wider.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 00:56

This week's guest on Trumanitarian is Gareth Owen. Gareth worked for many years at Save the Children UK as the humanitarian director, a position he left in December 2024, just about a month before the US funding freeze. I always enjoy my conversation with Gareth and find him to be one of the sector's most incisive voices. If you want to hear more from him, he previously joined Trumanitarian in episode 51, Panopticon. It was a great discussion. This conversation came about because I stumbled over Substack post Gareth wrote on humanitarian shrinkflation. His substack is called the humanitarian ape, and you should check it out. I was curious to learn how he thinks about the turbulence of the past year. I hope you find the conversation useful and don't hold back making noise on social media, LinkedIn, and blue sky is where you can find us and you can also reach us on info@humanitarian.org.

(: 02:00

We deeply appreciate your comments, positive and negative, suggestions to what we should do in the future. So listen and spread the episode around. And most importantly, enjoy the conversation. Garathon, welcome back to Humanitarian.

Gareth Owen (: 02:21

Thank you very much. It's very kind of you to have me back.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 02:23

You worked in the humanitarian sector for decades. You were the humanitarian director at Saved the Children UK from 2007 to 24, so a really long stretch in that central position. And so you're sort of the incarnation of Big Aid on one side. You got an OBE for Christ's sake, right? You're an officer of the British Empire. That's never a bad thing. You have an honorary doctorate from University of Bath. So you're quite establishment in terms of the humanitarian sector. At the same time, you have also always for me being a person who reflects very deeply about what we do. You've written a memoir called When the Music Is Over. And I understand that you're actually working on a second memoir called Unhealed Wounds, Trauma Aid in Angola about your time in Angola. So for me, you've always been somebody who has been in the game and played in big eight, but also always wanted to step away from it, be very critical and be very honest about the choices you make and defend those choices or reflect on them.

(: 03:33

I think what stood out for me when we last spoke on Tumanitarian was that you said you had chosen scale over quality and you would do that again.

Gareth Owen (: 03:43

Well, thanks for that introduction, Lars. And yeah, the second memoir is coming out on the 28th of March, and I'm looking forward to what kind of reaction it will get. It's a very personal account of my time in Asige and Milange in 1994. Yeah, it's been a year since I left Big Aid, as it were, big INGO aid. I spent best part of a quarter of a century swimming amongst the power gators of HQ, and somehow survived that, I suppose, is how I feel about it. But these days, I'm very much an outsider looking in. And I suppose I've deliberately taken the last year to reflect and to do some writing. You've seen some of my substacks and a couple of articles that I wrote. The last one was for the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs called The Managed Decline of Humanitarian Aid, which seems to have hit a nerve.

(: 04:33

It picked up quite a lot of response. So somehow it's talking to the community in some way.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 04:39

And we will talk about that, Gareth, but before we jump into it, what is it like doing nothing?

Gareth Owen (: 04:45

Well, that's what I was going to say. I mean, it's been fascinating really because after so long, more than three decades, and many ways, always feeling like something of an outsider, especially in the big establishment NGOs. It's been a fascinating process of letting go really. And I'm determined not to become one of those angry old white male aid workers of which there are many who take a sort of an angry view. I'm a hopeful human and I'm a forward looking human. Even though I like history and I like reactivating history, I like the inspiration of bygone eras and what they may offer both in the present and for the future. I'm really sort of intentionally quite hopeful and trying to be. And a lot of people said to me, "You got out just in time." So I left at the end of December 2024 and people said, "Did you know something?" And of course the answer is, "No, not at all.

(: 05:43

" Although I don't think you needed to be a visionary genius to see what was coming. It had been building up for years. I

Lars Peter Nissen (: 05:50

Think that's true, but you probably needed to have your nose less deep into it than we did to be able to see it.

Gareth Owen (: 05:56

Well, perhaps. And I'd spent my last few years inside a big INGO where I'd been in a position for very long time as a director, being deliberately almost 100% externally orientated. I spent very little time on internal affairs because I'd been there so long I was able to function in that way. And I suppose the smart thing for me was a realisation that it was personally the right time to move on. I realised really from a wellbeing perspective as much as anything else, and also that I could use my voice more productively outside the formal humanitarian structures, which in my experience seek to censor any notion of criticism really, even the most constructive kind, mostly out of what has become a kind of ingrained fear. So essentially, I found myself using the language of escape quite a lot over the last year.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 06:48

But you're still not answering my question, right? Because what I'm asking you is, what do you do when you get up in the morning? Do you go up and bake your sourdough bread? Do you go out and shoot 18 round of golf? I mean, do you play squash? Are you interested in grandfathering business, beekeeping? I mean, what do you do?

Gareth Owen (: 07:09

I haven't retired last. Everyone seems to think I've retired. I'm still active. I mean, quite a few projects, mostly in the thinking realm, which is where I think we're at. So one I'll mention straight out the gate, all of last year, a group of us were working on something we named the humanitarian society. I thought there must be one. There must be a sort of alumni setup, a bit like the Royal Society of the Arts where I'm a member, where an informal gathering place for sense making around the state of the world. Turns out there wasn't one. So we created the Humanitarian Society and it's going to have a soft launch at some point in the first quarter of this year. And really what that's about is creating a mutually supportive environment where we can try and sense make what's going on, both for the humanitarian sector as we know it, but also humanitarianism in the world at large.

(: 08:00

And it's not going to be ... And we have these gatherings every two months where we basically come together and we're not trying to promote the kind of formal humanitarian values in society, not the AIDS kind of principles, but really the notion of universal generosity of the human spirit that lies at the heart of a good community. So what do I spend my time doing? Thinking, writing, talking. I've been doing some lecturing, going into schools, trying to engage people really, because there's something very urgent about restoring, I think, prestige to a very declining post-industrial humanitarian landscape that's got itself into a real pickle and I think is increasingly dissociated from itself, but also from wider society. And that's something that we ... It can't be done institutionally, that restoration process has to be much wider. So myself and others are having these kind of grandiose ideas about what role we might play.

(: 08:55

There are an awful lot of very experienced humanitarians who are no longer on the inside, as it were of the formal sector, all of whom care deeply and all of whom want to play a role in reestablishing perhaps the role of humanitarianism as a counterweight to these awful forces that play in the world of populism, post-truth, polarity, polarisation, it's horrendous. And we're seeing that play out every day. And I think a lot of people are falling into despair around that. Well, the only option is to intentionally choose a different way, and we're going to have to develop the new. We're absolutely on a liminal boundary here. This is a threshold. This is the end of an era, and it's going to take an awful lot of energy and persistence and passion to come up with a very new way of being, not just as a formal humanitarian sector, but as societies at large.

(: 09:44

So it's a grand political project that I'm describing there.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 09:48

I'm still not fully satisfied with the answers to how you spend your day, but I think I'll ask your wife next time. I meet her, don't say another word.

Gareth Owen (: 09:55

I do a lot of walking. I live near Hampson Heath. It's beautiful. I walk, I go to the gym, I try and not be under her feet too much.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 10:03

All right, great. We are in that transition period, as you say, where clearly the way we have understood humans having action for the past decades is coming to an end. We can discuss how quickly, how the decline will be and whatever, but we can't discuss that it's ending. I think that is very clear. We're not going to come back to where we were. From your point of view, how has the first year of managed decline been handled? What are the dynamics you see from where you are sitting?

Gareth Owen (: 10:40

I mean, what's interesting about your question is I don't think it is the first year of managed decline. From my perspective, the managed decline, the sort of post-industrial emerging reality for the big formal sector and its institutions probably started in 2017 or 2018, certainly in the UK where I have obviously the majority of my experience and can speak with insight, you started to see the business model that had been in place for years throughout the expansive period. And we talked about this, I think on the last podcast we did, where I wrote a chapter in a book called Amidst Debree at the end of humanitarianism in the end of the liberal order, and this was in 2021. And people used to say to me, "What's the liberal order?" The level of illiteracy towards humanitarian place in the politics of the world was so huge, but we could see we went through an era of massive expansion.

(: 11:42

We all know the numbers. If you go to the UN FTS, you can see it peaked in 2022 at 43 billion. Last year it was at 24 billion, so a big cliff. But if you look at the underlying numbers around the business model of most of the big INGOs, it was already in decline because what they did was use the notion of growth as a proxy for impact throughout really the first decade and a half of the 21st century, as more and more money was being put into the humanitarian sector. And so it became an expansive industry that is now peaked and is in decline. So it's now in a post-industrial phase. It's not that dissimilar in the UK to sort of the coal industry or the steel industry. And what you've seen in the last year is crisis response that was possibly deferred by a lot of organisations through the COVID period and through that kind of economic period there.

(: 12:39

Suddenly, with all the cuts that came in in 2025, agencies had to go into crisis management around decline and a radical institutional kind of downsizing across the board. And what that revealed, I think, is that institutions act to survive as institutions first, inevitably, and the cause becomes secondary in that space. So if you look at who's left inside the institutions, the big NGOs, the big UN agencies, many of the frontline practitioners are the people who've lost their jobs, and it's the institutional fabric, it's structure that has had to be sustained, the finance mechanisms and all the rest of it, the compliance, the risk management.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 13:27

I agree with all of that. What I don't quite understand is the business about this beginning in 17, 18, because for me, there are two different ways of looking at this crisis, right?

Gareth Owen (: 13:41

Yeah.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 13:41

One is, are you getting the money? And obviously we were getting the money until quite recently. There's been significant increase up until you say 22, 23, maybe it starts plateauing and then some donors start to cut, and then there's a crisis in terms of income. And then there is the crisis of, are we doing the right thing with the money we get? Are we having the impact we should have? And I think that crisis goes back far further.

Gareth Owen (: 14:09

So that crisis definitely goes back further, but it depends where you are in the world, how this managed decline has set in. In the UK, it's definitely predates 2025 because what happened is cuts to the aid budget kicked in much earlier than that. So it went from 0.7 to 0.5, it went from 0.5 to 0.3. That was already happening. And what it meant for the big INGOs based in the UK is they had to retool their business model away from basically using state sponsored aid as their primary delivery money. And what they were doing was keeping the unrestricted money, the flexible money raised from the public and their private money to subsidise that business model. And that started to decline way before last year. It's just that for a lot of the agency, they deferred the restructuring through the COVID period because they chose to sort of try and sustain their kind of establishment structures.

(: 15:05

But you could see it on the inside. What happened on the inside was that you just had less and less resource to do the sort of things that I was known for, the collaborative, creative, expansive projects that were as much about systemic reform and systemic change as they were about responding to the immediate crisis in the moment. All the resource and space for that disappeared over years. And that was to the point where somebody like myself, I knew that the final moment would be the end of 2024 for me because it was just not the space to operate as I'd been able to operate internally in previous years. It had just been eroded in this process of ever constricting management of a declining business model that was starting to fail.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 15:50

No matter what, then 25 clearly became the year where you could not deny that something is falling apart, right? The US freeze is an accelerant or a litmus test. I think it exposes a lot of the weaknesses of the existing system. How have we dealt with that? How have you seen the sector react to that rapid decline in January 25?

Gareth Owen (: 16:11

I mean, sitting on the outside, but talking to many, many people on the inside, it's clearly been extremely traumatic. And I think what was interesting for me in my last few years at Save the Children UK, I was starting to work with external experts in trauma, psychologists, people with big coaching experience, and none of them had any baggage in sort of humanitarian history or institutional life. And so their reaction to encountering the organisation was really fascinating. And they would walk around, they would walk around the office and ask things like, "Where's the humanitarian soul? We can't feel it in this sort of corporate space." And that really struck home for me because, and the reason I bring it up is when I talk to sector, long serving sector people insiders and outsiders now, be they in government, UN, INGOs, it's the thing people refer to more than anything else in conversation is this perceived loss of the humanitarian soul.

(: 17:20

And the reason I think it's so relevant to what's gone on last year is I think it's just become so stark that institutions have had to move to protect the institution first, which is the superstructure that delivers a cause and the cause is the soul, but it's the institutional survival that's become such an imperative. And the way you do that is you shed costs. So it's a hard thing to describe in words, this loss of humanitarian soul. I mean, it's a feeling, a culture, a spirit, a sense of something mutually essential, being enacted in a courageous and ethical way. And you're right, the sense of that being lost over time goes back further, but it inevitably has to do with the way the formal sector and its institutions have been structured and the predominant incentives and cultures and behaviours. So it is about the money.

(: 18:05

It's always about follow the resource. And I think one of the effects other than this is a deep malaise, a general sense of malaise amongst those who are still inside the mainstream institutions. I think that's widespread across the formal sector now. Shame, fear, guilt, and they don't make good foundations for any organisation. And another problem I think is that's a manifestation of this, other than the trauma, the obvious crimes and loss of assistance for people around the world, which goes out saying that's the primary effect. But these deeper institutional issues matter because they're always skirted over. And this is the point that these kind of experts in trauma psychology would say, why are you not contending with these deeper questions that really are at the heart of your cultures? And one of the problems there is that humanitarian institutions today, just are no longer spaces of deep, vibrant thought, debate, or disagreement, the creeping managerialism that we've all seen build up over the last few years and the tyranny of being busy have driven out any time for necessary contemplation on the inside.

(: 19:14

So when you sit on the outside for a year and you really are just in a space of contemplation, these things come into really sharp focus. And you could see it around Gaza in my last couple of years, let's say the children. It really brought this lack of space to a head. The institutional business model was already failing and the soul was draining away, but organisations just could not contend with it. They couldn't contend with the stimulus of Gaza in terms of how to use it to deepen an appreciation of what's happening on the global stage. And it was similar with Ukraine as well. You could see that organisations were very technocratic and when these big forces of geopolitics started to play out, there wasn't really a political literacy and a political discourse internally that could contend with any of that, let alone the emotion of it as it built up.

(: 20:09

So I think what we've seen is institutions, it could be of any kind really. I mean, the humanitarian organisations are not different to the post office scandal or big banks or whatever else. They've had the same kind of institutional functioning.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 20:24

But basically what you're saying is first we lost our soul, then we lost the money.

Gareth Owen (: 20:28

Yeah. Well done last, much more succinct.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 20:32

So what's left?

Gareth Owen (: 20:34

I think what's left is, and this is a sense among many leaders that it already couldn't go on long before Elon fired up the wood chipper. I think we talked to a lot of CEOs for a project I did with Nufield College at Oxford in my last few years at Save the Children privately, and many of the chief executives, especially the INGOs, certainly here in the UK, are people I've known for many years. I think there's a widespread recognition of this challenge, this predicament they're in. And then it becomes, how do we come out the other side of this? If this is a genuine ending, because actually what we have been is a product of the Western liberal order and we've profited from that in the expansive period that we've seen, how do we get back to our core identity?

Lars Peter Nissen (: 21:25

If I remember correctly, there was a study where a lot of the chief executives actually said that they felt stuck, that they felt like they did not have agency. And it really made me think that the people who are the best paid, are the smartest, that are the most experienced, are the ones with most power in this business, sit there and say that they're powerless.

Gareth Owen (: 21:50

Effectively, that's what we were hearing. And it was quite revealing and very honest and I think quite brave for people to sort of acknowledge that if you sit at the top of a bureaucracy where you are governed by a board of trustees whose primary responsibility is institutional health and who answer to legislative environments that set the terms of that legally, then you've got a very, very rigid system that is very, very difficult to shift. And downsizing your organisations by choice is not something that happens very often. It's now been forced on everybody. So in a way, you could argue that by losing the money, it forces this big change anyway. And for years people said it'll take an external force to ... The sector's immunity to change has been written about for years and a complacency around that perhaps it builds up. So now we're seeing what the question now becomes, end things properly and then what do you restart?

(: 22:50

And I think that's the really interesting question and that because people have to see what's going on as a genuine ending of a certain era and therefore you can either try and restore what you had before and hold onto the debris like the ship's gone down, but you're floating on a piece of word on the ocean or you can say, "You know what? It's time to rebuild." And so it's very interesting to think about the time before the formal sector built up. So if you go back to the-

Lars Peter Nissen (: 23:15

But can I just challenge you a little bit because you said before you didn't want to be one of these grumpy old men sitting on the sideline shouting-

Gareth Owen (: 23:23

Am I sounding like one?

Lars Peter Nissen (: 23:24

Well, I mean, we lost our soul, we lost our money. I mean, it doesn't sound like a bright future or-

Gareth Owen (: 23:30

Oh no, I'm not angry about that. I'm sad about it. I think most people are. It's not anger, I feel. It's sadness.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 23:38

It's sadness, but there's also, I think, a deep frustration, at least that's what I have with the way global governance is being weakened the way the geopolitical realignment of whatever you want to call it that's happening, I think Gaza to a good chunk out of all of us. And so where's the good news? Because it's good that you're not angry, but I mean, if we want to be part of a solution, there needs to be a project. What's that project?

Gareth Owen (: 24:06

Right. Quite right. I think there need to be several projects. So for example, the formal sector can just limp along at a much lower base and probably doesn't have any real answers to how to change. It'll keep tinkering and ticking along with ever decreasing influence on the global stage. One could argue that is the manifestation of being a product of the liberal order, which is now no longer in play and disregarded by the very people who created it. That's what's so revealing, I think, in this moment is that the countries that championed the liberal order are now destroying it deliberately. And that's what we've seen in the last couple of years. Breaking things is easy. Putting it back is going to be a hell of a job. And it's as if one long lifetime since the end of the Second World War, we've forgotten why this institutional sort of order was created.

(: 24:59

It was to prevent the kind of extremes that we seem to be returning to with the rise of imperial kind of behaviours that we haven't seen for a good while. Anyway, so that's still on the bleak sort of trajectory. I think the answer comes through new knowledge production. So one of the things that we did at the very end of my tenure at Save the Children in response to the Ukraine conflict was to create something called the Alameda Institute, which was, it was the most politically orientated effort we'd ever made as humanitarians to get out of the kind of tired technocratic cage and start doing the deep critical thinking that this world moment demands. And we did a launch event in London a couple of years ago where a brilliant young South African political thinker made one of the most memorable comments I've heard in years.

(: 25:47

I

Lars Peter Nissen (: 25:47

Believe that was William Shuke.

Gareth Owen (: 25:49

That was William Shockey. And his message to us, Brits was basically, if you really want to help those living in precarity around the world, you could start by sorting out your crappy domestic politics closer to home. I mean, wow, how prescient a comment was out two years ago if you look at what's happened since. So the Alameda Institute was an example of what I think needs to happen now, which is new knowledge production to properly think our way onto a different path. And it is political knowledge production. We're very happy to talk about the root causes of malnutrition in the sort of frameworks and say get into, but why don't we talk about the root causes of politics in the humanitarian sector anymore? So the days, and I think this is a mindset thing. So new knowledge production, a different leadership mindset will have to emerge now.

(: 26:31

The days of the trusted clockwinders and the guardrail polishers at the top of bureaucracies, those days are numbered now because it's a law of diminishing returns that stance. So there's a massive need for education going forward, massive need.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 26:45

Yeah. But the people you described, that's basically you and me, right? I mean-

Gareth Owen (: 26:50

You're a clockwinder? And I don't think you're a clockwinder and a guardrail polisher. I don't think either of us- I do my best. We try to get beyond the guardrails and we've tried to turn the clocks hands to different times.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 27:01

Let me say, okay. The last episode we did on humanitarian, we had Alina Kamal from Indonesia that we both know who's a really impressive, I think, thinker and doer in the humanitarian space was done really good work on Myanmar. And we had Tom Burns who writes this great newsletter, Tom's eight dispatched on LinkedIn. And Tom was very much in the ISC world talking about implications of the funding laws, what the institutions had to do and so on. And Adelina was sort of on a totally different track of decolonizing, shifting power, new actors. And what struck me was that those two narratives never really touched each other. It wasn't a vendeagram, right? It was just two bubbles floating in air. And so my question is, when you worked as long as you have in the formal system, you become shipped by that. And so what does it take to come ... I mean, what is the way forward in terms of the sort of conversation we need to have because I don't see it happening and- It's

Gareth Owen (: 28:15

Definitely not happening. It's definitely not happening on the inside of the formal system. And I say that with much love for my formal organisation, which I adore, I still fundraise for them, I still believe in fighting the humanitarian cause and I think we have to double down on that in so many different ways. So for me, it's not an either or. I think the fallacy of the whole kind of international bad, national good localising ... Those debates for me were always too binary. It was always a both end. I mean, you need ... My thing around power and privilege was not that ... And I say this actually in the book that's coming out in March, the Unhealed Wounds, you have power and privilege or you don't. For me, it's a question of what you do with it. So if you're from a privileged society, I have an issue with you if you use your privilege to garner more privilege.

(: 29:10

I have less of an issue with you if you try and use your privilege to do good things. And if you look at the history of most of the INGOs, that's kind of where they've been at. It's a question of how that's evolved over time. So my thing is never power over. It's always power within power with and power too. And I think in that is a more mutual version of events. Yes, of course, the formal sectors kind of did what all sectors do. It kind of built its barriers and its codes and its boundaries and it kind of garnered resource and it kept a lot of people out. That's no longer acceptable to anybody. So there's no point staying in the debate around whether that can sustain. It can't. So I think there has to be a much bigger, much broader alliance built that goes way beyond.

(: 29:53

And actually, if you go back to the founders of my old organisation, Save the Children, if you go back to the Jed Sisters, before the formal The humanitarian system, as we know, it had really been built and constructed. This is 1919. Their vision was for grand alliances. And I think that's where you get into a deeper societal question around use power wherever you can mobilise it towards a much bigger aim again. And I think that's what we've got to get back to.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 30:17

But I'm going to continue pushing, right, Gareth, because your last Substack post is on shrinkflation. How do we sell the same bag of candy with less content, basically? It's about the formal system. It's about what Tom Fletcher is doing, and it's very loyal. And I think rightly so to Tom Fletcher, who is doing a good job with the constraints that come with that incredibly difficult position. Yes. But it's not about that conversation. It's not about new access. And here we are, again, two white guys talking. And so where is that broader conversation happening, Gareth? What are you doing to actually-

Gareth Owen (: 30:57

Yeah, I mentioned the creation of the Alameda Institute, which is based out of Brazil and attracts writers and thinkers from the non-traditional, deliberately outside of the formal sector. And I'm very proud of the fact that we used our platform to sponsor that. And this is what I mean about both end. I think you can't say the traditional sector needs to just disappear. I don't think anyone's really saying that.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 31:20

Nobody's saying that.

Gareth Owen (: 31:21

But it needs to reform. It's tried many times and it struggles to reform. So good luck. Those on the inside who still believe in that project and want to fight that, fight, fight it. I think for many humanitarians who've been inside in that space, they no longer see any putting their energy there. They see that as a waste of their energy now, versus using their long experiences to connect to a whole range of new actors. They exist and not in a romanticised way. What I'm interested in is kind of kindness, but with a harder edge. I'm talking about the rhetoric of localization that's been co-opted in some ways by the traditional system in a safe way, where it says, oh, but we'll go this far, but if it starts to feel really uncomfortable and we start to engage with some actors in a local sense or too exotic for us, we'll draw back.

(: 32:05

I mean, we've all heard that kind of discourse going on, and that seems very performative. But if you really want to make a difference in the world, then you have to go into the Amazon and find activist groups who are trying to fight against big agro business. And you have to really get your hands really dirty again. And it's something that I sort of ... It's a challenge. I mean, I'm too old for that now. I mean, I've had my day, but I think a lot of people are commenting about humanitarianism without having really got their hands dirty. And that might sound like a very challenging statement, but I think it applies to a lot of leaders who don't have the visceral connection.

(: 32:44

They haven't lived it in the way that some of us have. And that's what my book on Angola's about, is about being on the front line under shelf fire, alongside my colleagues, all of us together, meaning it properly and paying the price. And that might sound nostalgic and somebody sort of virtually signalling and being lost in the past. But what you get from doing that is a visceral association, an embodied association with the cause that you don't let go of. That's the fire, that's the passion. That's what keeps you burning. And it's not a cognitive thing. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's an exercise in human encounter and human emotion. And I think that's been lost for a lot of people who are just too distant from the realities of aid work. So we've got to break out and actually, I think the language is ... I had an experience a few years ago where, and let me tell this little anecdote because it's quite revealing.

(: 33:40

I went on a radio show in Melbourne, ABC radio, their national broadcaster. And I happened to give it going on and Eddie Izard, the comedian was on, and they got me on for some random reason. And I introduced myself on this national radio in Melbourne. I said, "I've been a humanitarian for 20 years." And the host interrupted me instantly, went, "What were you before Mate? A bastard?" And I thought that was really revealing. And so I learned in that moment, Scott, see it as a much more wider societal thing outside. Yes, my post on shrinkflation is sort of ... In a way, it's revealing the post-industrial truth. That's really the only option for Tom is to try and pitch things in a way. But what's out there well beyond that, that we're not spending any time because a lot of humanitarians, a lot of humanitarian leaders are just not curious enough.

(: 34:36

They don't get to the window and look outside and look, let them get out the other side of the glass. But

Lars Peter Nissen (: 34:41

We're not talking about those people, Gareth. We are talking about you, right? You have that connection to the work we actually do to the frontline. You've been there, you lived that, that has shaped you in many ways. You are curious. You are writing. You do have a platform. And I think what I'm trying to push you to tell me is, I don't expect you to jump into the jungle in Myanmar and start being a resistance humanitarian out there. I think probably more trouble than help if you did so. But what do you then do? What's your project?

Gareth Owen (: 35:18

So I've mentioned the Humanitarian Society. I've mentioned the Alameda Institute, which is about knowledge and creating spaces for knowledge. I think another project I'm working on is around being more human, which may sound obscure, but my partner and I are doing a sense making project with a cross section of people from all walks of society around human-centered leadership, which is a term that's out there and it sort of means different things. But essentially, we want to make the case for a return to being really human with each other, to re-embrace our humanity and reconnect with our generous human spirit, to see, feel, and sense ourselves and each other with compassion, kindness, and care. And it's amazing that we are talking to such diverse people, all of whom see that as central to their way of being in different walks of life from the technology sector, to education, to all sorts of places.

(: 36:04

And in a world that's going to be dominated by AI, which will take care of all the supercognition of AI will deal with all stuff that hinders us. Humans are going to have to be brilliant at being human again. So the human encounter becomes paramount. And that is ... So what would I do with that? I would challenge all the big agencies, and this is a project that some of us are starting to work on, to do mass outreach. And it will start here in the UK because we're Brits and it's our society and we have legitimacy to speak in our sort of domestic constituency way more than trying to preach to people around the world who rightly would reject our perspective on things. But why are we not in every school in this country and similarly where you are in Switzerland elsewhere, some countries do this talking about humanitarian values in society to children, it needs mass engagement because if you listen to something like the Wreath Lectures from this year, which are very popular on the BBC, very interesting Dutch thinker writing about the need to get back to the sort of mindset of the abolitionists and say, well, what inspired them to ... It was human pain that inspired them to sort of end slavery.

(: 37:12

And it was an outrageously grandiose notion at the time, but they did it. And we've got to go back there and we've got to build these big alliances and it starts with educating people at an early stage of life so that they become agents, so that they have voting agencies, so they have a consciousness. And we restore some prestige to this and we restore some soul to this. And if we don't do that, I think many charities who've, especially in the UK who've got ageing kind of support bases, they're just not going to be relevant. They're not going to be seen as relevant. And for me, it's about people are saying, "Oh, is kindness being lost in the world?" Not at all. There's plenty of kindness out there and there's plenty of resource really, but we're just not very good at inspiring people towards our version of events these days.

(: 37:55

And we've got to devote energy to it and passion to it and time and perseverance. It's not easy, right?

Lars Peter Nissen (: 38:01

Just to inject, the person you're talking about is Rutgert Bregman, the Dutch historian who has written moral ambition and who has a really, really interesting thinker. And what you just said is maybe what I was looking for because the way I've been trying to think about things and try to figure out what to do in this moment, the answer I sort of formulated for myself is that everybody's running around looking for an answer and really what we need is a conversation, the right conversation. And so I've been, I was at the start assembly, recently the start network assembly, and we did a panel where we had a musical director and a football manager talk about leadership and leading through the agency of others. And it just created exactly that you could feel the room changing and you could feel the connectedness. And I mean, there were people in tears.

(: 38:58

And I was like, "Yeah, this is what we need. We need this conversation. We don't need an answer plastered over another PowerPoint slide."

Gareth Owen (: 39:07

No, and preaching is also not the answer. We've got to show people rather than the power of this rather than tell them about it because-

Lars Peter Nissen (: 39:14

Yeah, exactly.

Gareth Owen (: 39:15

What I think I'm talking about is a hopeful stance for humanity, but an actively curated, hopeful stance on a grand scale. And stance is a really interesting kind of ... I work very randomlyYou asked me what I do in my spare time. For years, I've kept fit by working with boxers, but professional boxers, and they're amazing. They have this kind of embodied sense of stance, which is very practical and very physical for them in their sport. But they talk about, don't let anyone take you out of your stance. And so when you create the right kind of stance about that with values based in our sense and propagate it and just be defiant with it, I think that's what the humanitarians have always ... And part of that is being stubbornly hopeful for humanity. And I think that there's perhaps ... So look for inspiration where you can find it.

(: 40:01

So I think of people like Victor Frankl, and perhaps there was never more inspiring truth for the current moment than to be found in his words when he said, what is to give light must endure burning. And it may well be the case that we have to go through a very dark period for humanity, hopefully not as bad as in the past. Before we'll start to find the light again and find the purpose, even the most darkest of times, we're being dissociative, I think, quite a lot. And it's a human survival thing, and I know a lot about it having worked through trauma for myself, but that's not going to help us. So we've got to reengage with this and accept we're in a real difficult place, the world has taken a dark turn, but that's when we stand up. And that's when we stand up way beyond our tired institutional boundaries and we start reaching out to the poets and the creatives.What's so interesting about that is if you look at ... Here's to make it really relevant for a CEO, right?

(: 40:58

So because I did a talk in the summer last summer about this at Pembroke College in Oxford. People say, "Well, this all sounds very fluffy, Gareth, and very worthy and all that. " I said, "Okay, but let me make it more practical for you. " If you go to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, I don't know if you read these things, but I'm boring. I do. And if you look at the top 10 core skills that these people say are needed now, of the top 10, more than half of them are about humanness, resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, motivation, self-awareness, empathy and active listening, curiosity and lifelong learning. These are human qualities that the people who run the capitalist world are saying, "We've got to teach this stuff again," not turning out factory robots. That is what's got us into this predicament.

(: 41:49

So a big part of this is about inspiring future generations and what's happening, certainly here in the UK, we're losing the arts, the humanities courses are being cut, libraries are shutting. It's the artistry of humanitarianism that's being lost. The subjective human encounter is the thing that we have to get back to, not the KPIs, not the sort of impact measurements that are sterile, back to the human truth of it. And that is a dirty business. It's a scary, stubborn, uncomfortable world that people, if they're going to be really truthful about this, have to really, really decide they're going to reengage with. You can't do this from your ivory towers anymore.

Lars Peter Nissen (: 42:32

Gareth, that's a great place to end. Thank you so much for letting me come and bully you in your peaceful retirement. It's a real pleasure to reconnect with you. I'm not retired yet. Okay, whatever you are, thank you for doing this. I'm just getting started. And disturb your day and thank you for this conversation. It was really great to hear where your thinking is and-

Gareth Owen (: 42:53

Always a pleasure, Lars, and congratulations to you for having one of the few spaces of deep critical thinking in the sector.