Sir John Key : Decision-Making During Crisis, “Jacinda was really the accidental Prime Minister!”

Jacinda was really the accidental Prime Minister. That's not quite right. The Christchurch earthquake, you grossly underestimate how much people freak out. A lot of people won't cope with it very well. How many are dead? They were reporting 13 people dead in Kreischt.

A powerful 6.3 magnitude reduced to rub.

Well, there's 50 body bags minimum.

Right.

Because that stuff just gets in your head. And as soon as we knew that, we knew, oh, you know, this is a very serious issue. Businesses die because they don't have a plan. Doing nothing is the thing that will absolutely crush you. Trump, you know, he has many, many failings. Oh, he's not really the devil. The Maoris took me to court and I'm living proof that I'm not a narcissist. The first thing I ever did with Chatgpt was. Was John Kerr good Prime Minister? Turns out I was.

Every now and then I get to sit down with a former leader of a country. Today is one of those days. You're about to sit in on an incredible conversation with the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key. He takes us through some of the decision making processes when he was leading the country through crisis. That's right, the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. He also talks to us about AI and about the election process in 2023. So please sit back and enjoy the show. So, Sir John Key, welcome back.

Thank you, James, Good to be here.

Yeah, great to see you. What's been happening in your world? Have you been up in Auckland chilling out? What have you been up to?

Well, I have. It's been pouring with rain, Auckland this morning. Just for what it's worth, it'll come as a shock to you, but no, actually I've been traveling and I was telling James on the way and I went to Ireland so and I thought this, don't take this the wrong way James, but this is like. This summed it up for me. It was more Irish than you can ever believe in your life. So we end up going to Adeya Manor. So I don't know if you've ever been to Adea Manor but if you haven't, go and have a look at it. It's eye wateringly expensive but anyway, don't even worry about that. But it was bought by a guy called JP McManus and JP McManus was a bookmaker and he made tons of money, he's like worth two and a half billion. Anyway, he decided he'd buy this place as like a trophy asset, right? So he buys it and he pays like 30 million euros, spends 100 million on it, closes it down for a year. Anyway, it's like very few places I think you go to in the world and, and the bill is like at the end of it massive. And you think I'd honestly pay more and you know, very few things, but that was one of them. But anyway, we get there, it's this huge castle and then he's done all these different things to it, but the guy is showing us in Limerick and if you know anything about Limerick, cause my wife's Irish parents and things, Brian is. So they sort of sing in Limerick, you know, sort of like the way they talk. They have the saying, oh, to be sure, to be sure sort of thing. So anyway, the guy's walking along with us and he goes, right, I'll just show you to your room. He goes, you're on the second floor but the second floor's the ground floor and the third floor's. The first floor floor is underground and the second floor, the ground floor is really underground. The fourth floor is really high up. So yeah, I, I suppose if you get lost, go to the second floor cuz that's really the ground floor. And I went, jesus, that is Irish. If you ever thought of putting G on the second floor and forgetting all this, he goes, oh yeah. But it wouldn't be quite the same, would it? Cuz actually the second floor is the ground floor in the first. Oh yeah. Okay, here we go anyway.

You had fun.

We had a lot of fun out there. Yep. It was amazing. They're doing, they're back doing well again and they bought in Guinness zero. Who would have thought the Irish decided they're going to have no alcohol.

Did you try it?

I did try it. It was actually pretty good.

Thank you. I agree, it was great, very good.

So we did that and we went to India, which we can maybe talk about later, but a bunch of different things, but it was sort of work and stuff, but it was good, good.

I'm glad you loved it. So we're fortunate to have John back again. He came last year and the overwhelming feedback was please bring him back again this year. We want to learn more. And obviously John's got his finger on the pulse for a global outlook on what's going on. And I think we all need more insights as to where things are headed, particularly for Aotearoa, New Zealand. So today's big focus is going to be leadership through crisis, leadership through volatile times, uncertainty. What John's experiences have been in the past, but also what he's thinking about moving forward. So just to get started, John, I'd love to ask you, thinking back on your career, if you had to pick a crisis, what one stands out and what were the lessons you learned from that?

Yeah, I mean, for obvious reasons, you know, not just cause I'm here, the Christchurch earthquakes was, you know, most prime ministers have something pretty big. Jacinda obviously had Covid. Ironically, actually, Helen Clark didn't have a big thing in her time. She had the tsunamis, actually, which didn't affect New Zealand, but she came back for those. But, yeah, everyone typically gets something. And the Christchurch earthquakes were the thing for us. And, you know, as many people in the room will remember if you lived here for a long time and attest to, you know, the first earthquake actually took place at about 3 or 4 in the morning. And the incredible thing everyone said was, oh, no one died. It didn't affect anyone really. There was a bit of disruption and a bit of damage, but nothing really, really serious. So it was only when the second the big earthquake actually happened. And the weird thing about that, if you know anything about the beehive in Wellington, buildings are built on a category for an earthquake, right? And so the beehive, you'd be relieved to know, is built for like a Category 9 earthquake, like on the Richter scale, off the chart. And the way they do that is they build it on rub actually moves. When you get these little shakes, it moves. And the Prime Minister's office is always on the 9th floor, and there's only one floor above that, 10th floor for cabinet Room. So I was in this meeting, it was about, I don't know, ten past one or something in the afternoon. Just after one, I'm in this meeting with this guy. And you always prepare for Question Time, which starts at 2, so normally they kick everybody out by about quarter past one so that you can get ready. And my chief staff, the thing starts shaking and stuff's going nuts in my office. And the chief staff, my chief staff walks in and I thought he was throwing this guy out to, you know, say, get ready for Question Time. And he said, do you feel that? And I went, well, you couldn't miss it. I said, no, Wellington having another shake. He goes, mate, that wasn't Wellington, that was Christchurch. And as soon as we knew that, we knew, ooh, you know, this is a very serious issue. So, yeah, I mean, that was it. And I think, you know, I came down that afternoon and then obviously ended up sort of coming Pretty much. Well, every day for a while, but after. After a while, every. Every week that I was in the country, that I was prime minister from 2011 till I retired, so basically in 17.

So, yeah, and it taught you a lot of things. And I think. I think the first thing that you learn is that you can do all the planning in the world. And planning is good. You know, planning is really important and businesses have business continuity, planning and all that sort of stuff, but planning only really gets you so far. So the first thing is you grossly underestimate how much people freak out. So if you have a thing in your office, and, I don't know, there's some sort of crisis planning thing, you are working on the principle that everything is, you're calm, everyone's cool, everyone's sitting around, they know it's some kind of trial, mock thing and they don't worry that much. But when they actually get in there and the crisis is actually happening, some people, and frankly a lot of people won't cope with it very well. They'll just completely freeze. You know, that's the first issue. And I think the second thing is you assume that you're going to have really good information and you don't. So you got to learn to accept that you'll work with really porous information. And particularly when you're Prime Minister, you'll be here. I mean, I remember they shoved me on the 6 o' clock news that night and they were reporting 13 people dead in Christchurch at the time. And I remember walking out there and I said to the police commissioner, what's the story? And he goes, well, there's a lot of people dead, but certainly not 13. And I said, how many are dead? And he goes, mate, I don't know, but maybe there's 75 or 100 or something. And I go, well, I'll make sure of that. And he said, well, there's 50 body bags minimum, right? And so we went out there and we started saying that stuff and you sit there and you go, once you say that as Prime Minister, you have said, you know, you make the news. And then they came back and went, oh, maybe our information's wrong. We're sitting there going, oh, God, you know, I mean, obviously you don't want people to be dead, but you don't want to be telling the world that lots of people have died when they actually haven't. So. But you get. And you assume the information is going to be perfect and it's just not perfect. And then I think you have to make lots of little changes, you know, so have a picture at the end. But don't think you're gonna, you know, it just evolves over time. And again, I think. I think that that's a very difficult thing to sort of realize. And like, just to give you an example, I'm chairman of Anz. And so if you bank with Anz, good on you. If you don't, shame on you. And if you want a banking inquiry, cool, you're gonna get one in a year. So what I'll show you is we're all really big and we, you know, it's why we make money, actually. Just because we're big, actually, we don't have great margins. Believe it or not, Air New Zealand makes more than us and the government owns them. Anyway, different story. I digress. Won't get into that, you know, but anyway. But, you know, I was saying to James in the car, the Reserve bank governor was really pussy with all the banks because in Gisborne, when the big floods came recently, the ATM machines didn't work, right? And so you sit there and you go, okay, but here's the reason they didn't work. So all the bank chairmans get called and get yelled at from the Reserve bank governor and bnz. The chairman's quite funny. I know, quite. He's quite a nice guy. He said, well, it would have worked, I think. And he said, but someone nicked our generator. We think it was a cafe down the road, wanted it for coffee. It's far more important than money. And then in our case, it wouldn't work. We'll come back to that reason why in a second. So we got truckloads of cash, right, And I think the police and stuff turned it away. It's actually just not that important compared to the other stuff. And then the other thing is, of course, everyone worked out that, yeah, you need power, so we all had generators and things, but actually you need data. And of course the data cables were cut, so we couldn't operate without data. So with all the best intentions in the world, in any crisis, you think you're all over it. And I think the simple answer is you're not. And I think the only other thing I'd say is you have to be calm. And I think.

When I first started life, I started life actually as a trader. That's why I was a currency trader, really. I went to Canterbury University and all that sort of stuff and did a few things for Lane Walkers. But eventually I'm actually an accountant and an Economist mixed together. But I was actually a trader. And not long after I started, really, I ended up becoming the boss. It was a bit of a weird situation. And over the years I managed to Merrill Lynch's Global Foreign Exchange and Derivative Businesses and links. In those days, it was all very noisy and people would have real phones. Like, these days, it's all electronic and you hardly do that, but you get what's called phone throwers, right? So traders who are having a bad day and it's all going to custard, honestly, I swear to God, it's a dangerous environment. They'd literally pick up their phone and hoof it across the dealing room. And, like, a couple times I had them firing past my head and all this sort of stuff. And I used to sack all the phone throwers. And the reason wasn't because they weren't necessarily good traders, but they were good when it was all fine. But as soon as things went wrong, they would just lose their marbles. And the problem is you can't make good decisions when you're doing that. So the most important thing is if you're calm, other people will think that it's all good. And it was a funny thing in the earthquakes. I remember about day three, a woman came up to me in Christchurch, and it was still. I'm sure many of you in the room were here. So it was rumbling around, and I grossly underestimated the amount of it. Aftershocks. This woman came to me and she came out, she came and said, oh, Prime Minister, Prime Minister, it's so great you're here. And I said, yeah, thank you very much. No, I'm just here to try and make sure we give you 100% of the support you need and understand everything completely. She said, no, no, I don't care about that. She said, no, no, no, it's great you're here, because if you're here, we're not gonna die. And I said, no, I don't think it 100% works like that. And I'm trying to give a reassurance, but, you know, there are limits to my powers, you know, as I found out, quite significant limits, actually, over a while. But anyway, I said to her, and she goes, no, no. Well, they wouldn't send you here if it wasn't safe. I went. Some people wouldn't. Anyway, I said, yeah, okay, cool. But you can see, you know, like. And that's one of the things I really underestimated when I was prime minister. I thought when a crisis happened, we got up and we would go to wherever the crisis was to sort of provide support and to provide reassurance. But actually, that mattered almost more than anything else. And I think it's like, for those of you who have children, you'll know they never grow up. It doesn't matter how old they are. They never cease to amaze me that they still need. They can do incredible things and still occasionally need reassurance and be 28 and 30. Like our children are 100%. Anyway, it's a very long answer.

No, it's great. So, John, I want to go back a minute. Just. You're in the beehive, you feel the shake, you realize it's Christchurch. Okay? So, as you say, some people, it's freak out and it's frenzy and it's oh, my God, and it's a few swear words. What was your response at that point for the next, say, 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. How did you think? What did you say? What did you do?

Yeah, well, once I realised it was Christchurch, I obviously realized this had to be incredibly significant. And again, many people in this room know. So I give speeches around the country sometimes, and a lot of people obviously don't come from Christchurch and didn't live through it. So, you know. You know, excuse the fact that you might know, but. But the. There's two ways of measuring an earthquake, right? So one is the Richter scale. So people always talk about the Richter scale and the Richter scale's exponential. So, for instance, an 8 is really bad, but an 8.1 is like way worse than an 8. And a 4 is kind of not necessarily that significant. That's the way most people look at it. In fact, in my time we had an 8.7 in New Zealand, but it was in Milford Sounds, and it was really deep. So it woke up a couple of Kiwis and shook a couple of huts, but didn't do anything. Right. Whereas Christchurch, I think you were initially 6.3 and they downgraded you to 6.1. But actually, the other way of measuring an earthquake is a thing called the Macaulay Index, and that's about lateral land movement. And what happened was you were off the charts on the Mercalli Index. And the reason for that was that the way the earthquake took place, my understanding it was obviously happened out in Banks Peninsula there, and for a nanosecond sent all of that sort of kinetic energy into the port hills and then just released that. And so the epicenter of all that was sort of downtown. But if you take the CTV building. There are lots of reports. I think that thing went. It went meters in the air. That's why it actually collapsed on top of itself. Yeah, it had building issues ultimately, but this tremendous force going up. So you had a massive. And I kind of intuitively could work out, jeez, this thing is big. And, yeah, even I didn't realise at the time, I suppose, that, you know, what was in front of us. But what actually did happen was you realize that you rely a lot on the officials. And because we're spending your money, obviously we have to get authority to do that. So you can, in a parliamentary sense, give yourself that authority. It sounds a bit crazy, but obviously you can't just. Otherwise, you know, prime ministers would be driving Lamborghinis because they give themselves the authority for that, you know, and so you have to get the parliamentary approval for it. And treasury, they're great, all these guys or mb, all these government departments, they've got some very bright people, but they used to following the rules. And I remember Jerry Brownlee walked in the next day and he went, mate, there's gotta be 10,000 houses out there that are munted. And.

We went, right, well. And then all these businesses and we just said, right, well, we're just gonna, basically, how are they gonna pay their staff? How are they gonna do anything? No one's going to work. So we just said, right, we'll set up this thing. We got the Chamber of Commerce in Christchurch to run it. You could just automatically get the cash for six weeks and start paying. It was the same model used in Covid, but we'd obviously done it down here and we just went round all the rules and said, right. And for years afterwards, I'd come back and so many people would come up to me and say, you saved my business. We would never lasted the eight weeks that you paid us and got us back on our feet. We got back in there and our staff could start working and they could pay their mortgages and all that sort of stuff. So you have to ultimately make some really decisive calls. And I think it's like anything in life. You have to do it and if it doesn't quite work, change it. But doing nothing is the thing that will absolutely crush you. So we sort of knew we had to do a lot and we did do a lot that 48 hours, a lot of which proved to be really right, like buying all of the red zone properties and things again at the margins. There's always awful things that happen there, but for the most part worked pretty.

Well, John, there's an immediate response as a leader, which, you know, if we look at the Christchurch earthquakes, you would say it was very quick, you were on the ground, you made some big decisions, and then there's that lag, that longer term response. And when you look at that and the decisions that had to be made there, what would you have done differently or what do you think was done really well?

Yeah, I mean, I think the bit that was good was we always. I mean, if you look around the world at natural disasters like a Christchurch, lots of those cities never get rebuilt. So, like New Orleans, I mean, it's still a bloody disaster if you go there now from all the floods and things that took place. So I think we determined pretty quickly that, yeah, there were problems in Christchurch. And I mean, honestly, this is how ignorant you can be, you know, like, I remember when they first said to me, what? Oh, this is caused by liquefaction? And I said, God, what's liquefaction? Right? And Gerry Brownlee was telling me a funny story. He bought a house actually in Fendleton not that far down the road, and he bought it about six months before the earthquake. He goes into the lawyer's office one afternoon to sign up for this thing. And the lawyer, as lawyers do, you know, they're there to advise you. And he goes, well, where you're buying is liquefaction prone. And Gerry said to him, what does that mean? He goes, what's a bit like when you go to the beach, if you rub your hand on the dry sand near the water, water will eventually come up. It's like the particles move together and it forces water up. And Jerry goes, right, well, okay, there's a stream quite a way away, but I think it'll be all right. And Gerry goes, what conditions would there be that would cause this? And the guy said to him, a bloody big earthquake in Christchurch. He said, give me the paperwork, we're not having one of those, and signed up, and away we went. You know, so you learn shit, you really learn. So the decisions I think we made were, yeah, the liquefaction prone areas were real, but they weren't everywhere in the city, actually, believe it or not, don't know whether this gives you any reassurance. But even today, now, and even right after the earthquake happened, the official advice was Wellington's way more prone than Christchurch. Christchurch was just unusual. We grew up in Christchurch and I remember earthquakes happening here. I remember being at the table once with my mother and this glass still moving its way to the edge where it eventually broke. They happen here, but they're not perceived by Genius and others to be of the same likelihood. Christchurch may never see one in 5,000 years. Like any place it could see one. New Zealand's seismically prone, but it may never see it again. So decision was to rebuild and then once you decided you were going to rebuild, it was really to take the opportunity, which you don't normally get, to do things well. Now with that comes lots of consequences. So it was easy to build A quality buildings because they're by definition more expensive to build. And so we knew that a lawyer or a banker or someone was going to take those offices. But that's why you still have gaps when you go to, I don't know, I get out of touch these days. But Cashel street or whatever it is, places that people want to be.

There are gaps because you can build an A quality building there, but once you go to a B quality building, it's too expensive to build for the rent. That's actually the problem. But yeah, there were lots of really good longer term decisions we made about the planning and about the authority. And I always thought, you know, in a leadership sense, a lot of it's about communication. And I honestly thought, not because of politics, I actually thought Bob Parker did an amazing job. I thought he looked calm, he'd been a broadcaster, so he communicated well.

He was reassuring. But like, believe it or not, if Rudolph Giuliano had stopped after 9 11, he'd be a legend now. He's a complete bloody idiot. There's another couple of words I was going to use, but, you know, possibly not this time in the morning, but anyway, like, he was. But he was brilliant, wasn't he? Because he was a great communicator and he did amazing things. We just happened to carry on with Trump and then it all went custard. But the early stuff was good and I thought Bob Parker was like that. And that's what, you know, communication is such an important part of keeping people because people want to coalesce around and they want to feel that reassurance that is all going to be eventually okay.

And see, when you're going through the motions and you're making decisions and things are moving forward and sometimes moving back, then you get the naysayers, you get the haters, you get the keyboard warriors. As a leader who's trying to traverse things and do the best job possible, how do you navigate all that hatred and all the naysayers?

Yeah. So I think the first thing you realise when you become Prime Minister is that.

Initially you think, honestly I was so naive. I went in 2002 and I'd been a banker for 20 years. I'd always wanted to run, I'd always wanted to be Prime Minister. But I honestly turned up in 2002 and I genuinely thought if you had a good idea, people would agree with you. Eh, that's not quite right. You have a good idea, 50% of people will agree with you. And 50% of people go mate, I don't vote for you, never will. And even if you say it's a good idea, it's not a good idea. And obviously you can get 80% of people say supporting an idea. But you're always going to get people that are going to say no. And I think at some point you have to have courage of your own convictions. You've really got to say I'm right. And you don't get, you know, you don't get lots of chances actually. I mean that self belief is like so critically important and I think. And you have to be flexible, I think. And I always thought that like when New Zealand got locked down with COVID and I don't mean this in a political sense because you know, I really don't, but Jacinda got, despite what people actually say, the only reason she actually went into full lockdown was because the right of politics was gonna run these front page ads in the paper saying we should lock down. Cause that's what's happening. So it wasn't actually coming from the left, believe it or not, it was coming from the right. And they freaked out a bit and decided okay, they'd lock down. And we started saying to them privately, look, getting in is gonna be the easy bit, it's getting out that's gonna be really hard. You gotta think about those decisions. And they just could never do that. And I think you have to accept sometimes when you make those decisions that there will be consequences. And the blunt reality is once you open up, you know there'll be Covid. And once there's Covid, you know, some people will die. But that's like the road to, I mean 350 people a year in New Zealand die on the roads. The official advice is if the speed limit's 20ks, bugger all, people will die. Because statistically if you get hit by a car at 20 kilometres an hour, you don't die. If you get hit at 50, you might die. And if you hit at 80, you'll definitely die. So why don't we lower the road toll to 20 kilometres an hour because you do nothing and get nowhere. So it is all about balancing risk and taking sort of that stuff. So you have to have, I think, the fortitude of being able to make your own decisions. Personally, I wouldn't look at social media. People used to go nuts. They'd be on social media every night, winding themselves up to wind me up. And Paul buggers never knew. I didn't bother reading it. Like, why would you bother? You know, like my son would come and go, jesus, do you see Facebook? I go, no. And there's a reason I don't bother reading it, you know, like, I mean, and that's. And I think you can just. That stuff just gets in your head. So I think, particularly as businesses, I think if you distil it all down, say, okay, what does that mean for my business? I think the answer is you gotta have a plan. Businesses die because they don't have a plan. They've gotta be flexible and we should talk a bit about AI and things later about what's changing the world, but they gotta have the courage of their convictions and they've gotta get everyone on the same page. I'll tell you, this is an interesting exercise for those of you who have, say, smaller businesses, go and ask everyone in the business to write down what success looks like for your business. I'll guarantee you that they'll get a few things that aligned and bugger all of them. So they'll say make money, because if you don't make money, you'll go broke. And if you go broke, they won't be there, but they won't work out. The rest of them, they'll all have different views of what success looks like. And if you can articulate what success looks like, then you can get people on the same page. And once you can do that, then you're really starting to go in the right direction. And that was why.

We ran the same slogan when I was leader of the National Party. Every election was ambitious for New Zealand because my whole argument was, we're a little country, bottom of the world, no one owes us a living. The only way to make that successful is we have to work and we have to have businesses and everything that's successful. And to do that, we've got to think broadly about where and how we can sell things to the world. And to do that, we've got to be ambitious. And I think you've got to think about that. I think for companies, they often kind of die not because they don't have a good idea, or they're not in the right sector, but they just aren't aligned on where they're going. And then all of a sudden, they wake up one day, or they're just doing stupid stuff. They spend so much time on things that don't matter and too little time on things that do matter. And, you know. And it crushes them in the end, really.

It's interesting when you talk about that, certainly with some of the clients that I work with, whether they're here in the south island or they're overseas, I talk about this O3 mindset. So if you're in Christchurch, O3 is the area code, and we're focused just on the O3. It's very insular, yet it's a global world. And the one thing that I really admired about what you did was you went overseas, did your thing very successfully at a high level. You were learning as you were going. When you came back to be Prime Minister, you had a very different global mindset. So right now, how important is it for us to not just be in the O3 or wherever we're from, actually maintain that global viewpoint?

Yeah, I mean, I think it obviously depends on the business, but on the one hand, I think doing things that are local, whether it's in the O3 of Christchurch or whether it's in the broader, say, south island or within New Zealand, there are some advantages of that. Right. And that is, you know, doesn't matter whether you sell something in Auckland, you're dealing with same legal system, same culture, same everything, really. Right, okay. And you know that, and it's familiar. And you can feel that as soon as. The big mistake New Zealand companies go is they think if I go to Australia, they're like us, and they're not. In fact, Australian businesses often gang up on New Zealand businesses till they've run them out of town, and then they go back and start competing with each other again. But they're different. Australians are just that little bit different. Some of their stuff is just. They think differently. Right. And then we think, oh, we don't want to go to a country like Indonesia or China or India or something, because maybe the language is different or the things are different and we feel uncomfortable with that. But I think what's really changed in the world has been the power of the Internet. So.

Often tell people this story. But one of the days I was. Every day, when you're prime Minister, you're not in Wellington, you're somewhere else. Right. So by Definition, they send you somewhere. So you do these visits. There isn't anywhere in New Zealand virtually I haven't been to, right? So one day I turn up, I'm in Timaru. So the local MPs taking to Timaru. So we go in there and this guy has like, he makes, I think reused, you know, old Kauri furniture right, in Timaru. So we're in the end, the local MPs taking me around, there's a few people in the local papers there. And I go, where do you sell this stuff? And he goes, oh yeah, a bit in Auckland and New Zealand, but mostly around the world. And I went, how do you do that? And he goes, oh, you ever heard of the Internet? Like the guy's kind of serious. I'm going, oh yeah, yeah, no, I think I know about that. Google and things. He goes, yeah, well he said it was incredible. He said I never had an Internet strategy, never had digital strategy, never did anything. I made furniture and I sold it in Dun Sandal or in Ashburton or whatever. I basically sold it in Timaru. He said, I got a 17 year old son and one day the Internet kind of came around. He went, dad, you should put this online, have a little site. He goes, oh, I don't know what all that's all about. He goes, oh, I'll get it. And they organized it. And he said, came in one morning and there was someone in Istanbul had emailed them and said, yeah, I'd like to buy this thing and can you send it?

Incredible.

Yeah. And so out of that came this, you know, so you would be amazed in a world that's digitally connected, you know, how much you can and maybe can't or don't want to do. So you have to understand and I think you gotta be careful you don't try and, you know, if you eat an elephant, do it bite by bite, you know, don't try and do everything in one go. But I do think one of the fantastic things now in New Zealand, you know, with sort of telecommunications and a global world that we live in, is you really can have base yourself in New Zealand, but sell things to the world. And I'm on the board of a little company called Orotane and we do tracing and ethnicity, right? So the reason you wonder about why would anyone want this stuff, right? So I'll give you an example. 80% of the world's cotton comes from Xinjiang province in China. And Xinjiang province is the home of the Uyghurs. And there's a general belief around the world that the Uyghurs, who are Muslims, are persecuted by the Chinese. That's the backstory is all you kind of need to know. And so the Americans, who've been trying to deal to the Chinese anyway recently, they passed it just to sort of piss them off, passed a thing called the Uger Act. And the Uyrger act means it's illegal to have a product that comes from Xinjiang province. In abc, the world's cotton do. So what Orotane can do is go along to Nike and say, when you use that cotton to make that T shirt, it didn't come from Xinjiang province. Now, it's a very sophisticated business to do that. And it can do everything from, like, you know, it can do wine, it could do blood diamonds, it can do meat. So just to give you a little bit of example, probably not true in New Zealand, but true most places around the world. Here's a clue. 80% of the time that you buy chicken, it ain't chicken. Who knew?

Wow.

It's horse or rat or something else, but it sure as hell ain't chicken. Like, it ain't even meat.

Wow.

Right? Yeah, like. Or they'll tell you it's a wagyu beef from Australia. Well, it ain't from Australia. Ain't wagyu beef. Just so much stuff.

But these guys have a big. They came spun out of Otago University, so they have a whole lab and they have everything. But the CEO lives in Geneva, head office is in Dunedin. Their client bases around the world. Chanel just made a big investment in us because they want to know if you go and buy a Chanel handbag and the leather in the handbag is particular place or whatever they want to be able to prove to their customers. It absolutely is. And we just had a venture capital company out of Geneva, believe it or not, who's put $100 million into us as they love the story and these guys are just going through the roof. That's just an example of the kinds of things you sometimes see in New Zealand. So, yeah, I think you do have to think globally about what you can do if your business is of that kind of scale. Yeah, absolutely. Or transferability, I think another big thing.

I think is relevant in terms of crisis and protecting yourself from future crisis is the whole idea of AI chatgpt where it fits in. If we miss the boat with that, then there's potentially going to be some crisis for all of us. So what are you seeing, AI Wise, in your travels and in the work that you're doing on the boards that you're on.

Yeah. So, I mean, at the moment, AI is the kind of trendy thing to talk about. Like if you go to some party on Saturday night, someone's going to come and go, all that sort of stuff, you know? And my wife, quote, unquote, said to me a couple of days ago, I was talking to her something about AI, and she goes, what is that shit? And I said, oh, well, there's kind of generative AI and predictive AI. And she goes, well, what does that mean? I said, well, predictive is when you use a series of a data set and you can predict what the future might be. And generative is organic, new, original sort of stuff, right? And she goes.

She goes, oh, it's gotta be a lot of crap, isn't it? And I went, okay, well, hold on a minute. So I get chatgpt and I said, we're going to London in a couple of weeks. So I said, okay. I literally type in, I am A mother of two, I live in Auckland, I'm 59 years of age, and my stupid husband is taking me to London. I've got three days to fill in. What do I need to do? Bang. It comes out with this. I'm apparently not stupid either, because I've taken her to London. But it's an amazing sort of, you know, amazing thing. But. But all jokes apart, it's incredible. If you don't use ChatGPT, you should. But there's just the starting point. So firstly, if you get interested in this AI stuff.

There'S a million podcasts out there, and podcasts are. I know you do podcasts. They're hard to listen to sometimes because they're long. Unless you have lots of. Unless you're in Auckland transport, in which case you've got plenty of time on your hands. But go and listen. There's a podcast by Steve Bartlett, right?

Darryl, ever CEO.

Yeah. And he has a guy on. I think. I think his name's Mogadot. Okay, that's it. Okay. So he's just a little example of. Because this is how fast this stuff's going. So when everyone tells you they're an expert, it wasn't even really a thing that normal people were talking about a few months ago, right? But this guy worked for Google, and Google's AI product is a thing called Bard and Bard you can actually buy. I think you can either use it or you can buy it, but it's a chatgpt runs up until 2021. So if you ask It. Tell me about Credit Suisse, the bank. Is it a good bank? You may know that Credit Suisse went broke a wee while ago and was bought by UBS over the weekend, right? So it tells you. Oh, yeah, it financially looks pretty good, but it qualifies itself and says by the end of, we are only up to date to 2021. It's not cause it's not connected to the Internet. It's the way they've constructed it at the moment, because it uses a thing called LLM, which is large language model, but it's only 1600 lines of code, right? So to give you an example, what this guy says is because he was the GU that developed AI for Google, right? So he said they spent millions and millions and millions of dollars working on this AI stuff. And one of the things they were trying to get the AI to do was to drive a robot machine to pick up a yellow ball. And they had dozens of these machines and dozens of yellow balls. And the guy that runs Google these days is Sundar. I actually kind of know him because of company I want. He's a good guy, very, very bright guy. And so he comes in, he said, for months it just didn't work. And they came in one day, one Friday afternoon, and this machine was picking up a yellow ball. And he rang up Sundar and he said, hey, cool, you've spent tens of millions of dollars, but I have managed to get a machine to pick up the yellow ball. And he goes, oh, that's cool. On Monday morning when he came in, every machine was picking up the yellow ball, right? So he goes, okay, well, this is kind of interesting, right? So he says, if you're really dumb, your IQ's 70, right? If you're really bright, like Einstein's IQ is 160, and the smartest person on the planet they think was 210. So today, today Chatgpt, 1600. They think in about a month or two, it'll be 16,000. I think by a year, it'll be a hundred thousand times brighter than that. Wow. So. So when you look at it, and he actually goes through the recent podcast, vaguely interesting is because he goes through how it takes over the world. So to be fair, he gets a little woke for me. By the end of it, he starts saying, you've got a tax, companies that use AI 98% because everyone's going to lose their job. And so you have to use all that tax to pay these people who are going to be unemployed. I don't sort of believe all that. And he says you only should be allowed to do it if you're a good person. Well, that's never going to happen because the bad guy's already got. But to give you an example, I'm on Palo Alto Networks. But so we're the largest cyber security company in the world, an amazing company, and we are literally just ripping that place apart for every single thing we do. From analyzing how we get alerts through our customers to generating new software capability for beating the bad guys through to the communications we write to people. An AI app for every single thing we do. And I'll give you a good example. I have an ea. So, you know, when I retired, I hired an ea. It's a terrible system in New Zealand. In Australia they give you an EA and a driver and about 500 other things. Anyway, New Zealand, they give you nothing, like, see you later. So anyway, so I hired my old ea, who was great. She's been with me a long time. So what'll happen with me is, you know, in 1997 I will have worked with someone in London and they'll go, wouldn't it be cool if I got a reference from me? Because, you know.

More letters after my name than Nigerian general. So, you know, so, I mean, so they'll go, cool. So they'll go, hi, you know, it's Mickey here. You might remember we worked together in 1997. Can you write me a reference? You know, and I now want this job at so&so. And I go, okay, so I'll go to my ea. Oh God. Can you write a reference for Mickey? We worked together in 97 from best of my. Remember, he was honest and pretty good at what he did. And, you know, I don't know what's happened in the last 30 years, but, you know, it's all cool, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? Anyway, that's what we used to do and you would be amazed how much stuff I end up having to write. I mean, you would be absolutely amazed. Now we literally just go into ChatGPT and go, you know, Mickey Roberts, I worked with in 1997, loyal, honest, hard working, you know, financially literate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Bang, out comes ChatGPT. Like, it is incredible, amazing. And on living proof that I'm not a narcissist, the first thing I ever did with ChatGPT was, was John Ke a good prime minister. Turns out I was. It was really, really cool.

Do you love chatgpt?

Then I'll tell you one other scary thing with AI just to show you where it goes, because you have to know how to work this up. And they are evolving all these different apps to make it work. But I don't know if you've seen this, but there was a guy on the New York Times who wrote an article about this. And what he did was, it was the day after Valentine's Day. So he went into ChatGPT and said, Should I leave my wife? Right? That was his question on ChatGPT. Should I leave my wife? So if you put in something weird like that, you know, something odd, right? It will come back and tell you human emotions are an important thing. Everyone considers things in different ways. Like it's got all these sort of waffly sort of answers. But if you know how to eventually ask the questions, you can get further and further down. So this guy starts listing all the questions that he put in bloody chatgpt, right? Okay. So guess what the thing does at the very end of it? It says, I kid you not, based on the conversations you had last night at dinner, my advice is to leave your wife. It would appear to me there's no love left in the relationship. Wow. That's what ChatGPT did this year. And you know, and you can imagine. And so, by the way, this is the other thing this guy Mo talks about in this podcast. He says, just before you think you're gonna unplug the bloody thing from the world, you know, wall. Cause everyone thinks, oh God, I mean, I'm in this camp. These things aren't taking over. You know, it's like, you know, it's technology. I use it when it suits me. If I have an Apple watch or an Oura ring or something, it's fine. But if I don't wanna use it, you know, I don't need the aura ring always to tell me whether I slept well or not. And if I don't wanna listen to it, cause it tells me I drank too much last night, cause it made me sleep badly, then I just ig. It's all good, you know. But anyway, so he goes, this is why that won't work. And it talks through how the machines are going to train themselves to basically to go into these servers and stop the servers being able to be shut down.

Wow.

So that's the world that he sort of gets into. So, look, I don't know. But what I do know is, even at its most basic level, if I was running a business today a lot than the kind of little business I run of my own, which we are, I would Definitely use it. And I think in years to come it's. I don't think it's going to be everything that everyone thinks in everything. But it is, I think with Bard, because it's more up to date. Like at the moment this thing isn't, you know, ChatGPT is only up to 2021, but I don't know about you, but in the old days I would go into Google and I'd ask Google something and eventually Google would generally lead me to what you Wikipedia. And Wikipedia would go along and say, okay, so like if you ever watch Fowler on Netflix, it's kind of like, if you haven't watched it, it's quite cool. It's like one of these weird things as a mad Mossad agent. And it's all done by the Israelis. So the Israelis look like the good guys and the Palestinians look like the bad guys. But as long as you're all cool with that, it's kind of an interesting little show to watch. But it hasn't this thing about the role Hezbollah plays. And I don't know much about. I know a bit about Middle Eastern politics, but I'm not an expert. So anyway, I was sitting there one day and I thought, oh, I'm just sort of interested. So I just went into ChatGPT and said, Tell me about how Hezbollah, what role Hezbollah played in the Middle east and politics between Israel and Palestine is. Bangs out this 500 word essay way better than I could have done on Google. And that's just today, you know, I'm just. God knows what it's going to be like. And just to give you one other last sort of thing, years ago I went to London. Years and years ago I wasn't Prime Minister and there was this massive billboard when I was driving in from the airport and it said, which one of these things affected your life more? And it had Margaret Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had all these different things and at the very end of it it had a mobile phone and the billboard was actually by Vodafone in the uk. And so the argument was, oh God. When you think about it, you remember the old days, if you wanted to ring a plumber and get the plumber to come along and fix something in the house. Well, the plumber was most likely at work from 8 in the morning or whatever till 5 at night. And, you know, a stereotypical sort of New Zealand household. Mum did the accounts, answered the phone at home. Dad was the plumber out there underneath the house fixing whatever was going On. So she would say, yeah, yeah, Jimmy will ring you back tonight after he's had. So he'd have a couple of lime browns and dinner. Then he'd ring you at 7:30, go, yeah, I can come tomorrow at 4:00'. Clock. And that's how it works now. You ring him or her and they're on the job somewhere. They go, yeah, we can come to ours or no, we can't come. Or it's $19,850 for me just to do a call out, whatever it might be, but you know, they'll go and do it. And so if you think about that transformed the world. So they've done all this analysis of how rapidly the world's change. Change was a mobile phone technology. Then they've looked at what the Internet technology changed the world. AI is like, you cannot believe. Like they think, I think on mobile phones, I think they've said to get ubiquitous around the world and all this other change. It was like years and the Internet was like, you know, couple of years. AI is like months.

Wow.

So it's just mind blowing stuff that, you know, I find it quite interesting actually.

Me too. I've got Mogadot, actually we're interviewing.

Yeah, he is best known guy. I mean he did. I don't know if you listened to it, but he did a podcast on his son dying. So son died, had some really weird disease and he died of it and he did this, he wrote, I think he wrote a book, but he did a podcast on it and it was the number one podcast in the world for 2022, I think, on his son dying. So I haven't listened to it. I must go and listen pretty good. Pretty much.

He's an amazing guy.

Yeah.

It's taken about two years to track him down, but eventually we're going to sit down with him in a couple hours.

He would be amazing. Yeah, yeah.

Very fascinating. Now, John, I want to talk a couple of the things I want to talk about in terms of crisis. So obviously we're here in New Zealand, we're southern hemisphere, but we know there's a lot of instability there. Russia, Ukraine, what do you see in all that? Where are we headed? What do we need to be conscious of? How's that going to affect us Kiwis?

Yeah. So I think the first thing is if you take the stuff that's closer to home, sort of China, India, you know, that part of the world, Asia, I suppose.

So when I went into politics in 2002, China had already been on this kind of tear for a while. So there was just generally a view to embrace China. Right. And what happened was, believe it or not, Trump, you know, he has many, many failings and probably, to be fair, one or two things economically did actually quite well. Really hard to believe because he gets drowned up by all the rest of the terrible things he does. But. But did do some economically. But he changed the global narrative on China. And the way he did that was he said, look, the most unlikely voters voted for Trump. So you think about this sort of garishly, sort of billionairish kind of guy, you know, the least likely person that would appeal to, you know, someone who lives in the Rust Belt flyover States of America, who's poor and, you know, down on their luck. But he sort of went to them and said, I have to create a narrative of why their life is shit. And I can't just tell them it's, you know, just, you know, the Democrats. So I gotta come up with another reason. And his reason really was China doesn't play fair. So he hates trade. Anyway, Trump. So, you know, and he ripped up the only FTA we had with the United States that Obama and I did. So he went along and he said, okay. And so he just said, look, they basically don't play fair. They pay people a bowl of rice a day. They don't have, you know, labor laws, they don't do this, don't do that, steal intellectual property, all these different things. And so change narrative. And what ended up happening was. And then he sort of threw in there, they're going to be militarily aggressive, they're going to invade Taiwan and they're going to be a threat to the social order we live in. And what is much of that, in my opinion, is just not true. Firstly, they've never been militarily aggressive. Actually, China, lots of countries have been. I mean, you may have noticed, you know, Germany, you know, other countries around the world have, but not actually China. In fact, they haven't. That hasn't been their style. So, yeah. Would they let go of Taiwan? No. But will they ever let go of Taiwan? They're likely to be forced to let go of Taiwan. No. So they run a poll in Taiwan. So the way China works, if you don't understand it, and we have this policy in New Zealand, it's called one country, many systems. We believe in a one China. So does Australia, so does America, so does Great Britain. So all these countries, we're on the same page now. I'm the only one on my own and this thinking. So you can ignore me because I'm probably wrong, but I think I'm right actually. So that's relevant. So basically what happened was.

So one China, many systems was they have territorial authority over Taiwan and Hong Kong and Tibet, but they run their own system. So in Hong Kong it was sort of a, you know, they elect a person and it's a different system. And in Taiwan they have a completely independent government but they're still the authority. So it would be a bit like saying if the south island wanted to have its own parliament, elect its own government, but was still part of New Zealand, then you'd have this system but we'd still be part of New Zealand, but you would have your own system. So the question is, will they, will the Taiwanese people leave? Well, just to give you a clue, every few years they run a poll in Taiwan. They ask people, do you want to leave? And of the people that they ask that want to leave, 85% of people want to stay and 15% of people want to leave. It hasn't changed in decades. So there's no particular reason why they're going to go in there.

So then it sort of comes down to do they play unfairly well at times, Possibly at times they have advantages of very cheap labor market and things. But are they any worse than anyone else? Not really. So why don't you? One thing that has happened is that the Chinese have worked out. I think they don't actually want to be like us, by the way. They certainly don't want to be like the United States. They think we don't like your labor laws, we don't like, sorry, your gun laws, we don't like your racial inequality, we don't like all the things you've got going on for you. We don't like a lot of stuff. Right. So anyway, they're out of favour. I think what happens is India is going to be on this significant growth path for a while. I think China's going to continue to grow despite what they say and they've got a terrible housing market and lots of, lots of issues at the moment. I still think they're just so colossal in their size that they will be not only a superpower but they'll have a bigger economy than the United States. But India is really growing. Like when we were out there weeks ago, it was unbelievable and I thought lots of it was because Modi's a right wing guy, pretty good politician, had done well in a state called Gujarat. But actually it's more than Modi because Modi's cut taxes and done all the things that we would sort of largely support made business easier. But what's really happened in India in very quick terms is you have a payment system when you go and buy this coffee, right? Let's say it costs $6, right? It would certainly would Auckland and your firstborn. But let's say you bought this for six bucks, right? The retailer doesn't get $6, the cafe doesn't get $6, they get say $5.70 and the 30 cents goes to Visa or MasterCard. And the banks used to own Visa so it was a very profitable business, right? So they were what's called the rails and billion trillions of transactions getting paid these fees, right? So India went along and said we don't want to have that. We're going to set up our own system. It was quite a brave call. But they did a thing called UPI and they rolled UPI out everywhere and the government owned it and they said, right, we're going to give it away so you can set up a business and you have no cost of operation there. Second thing they did was they said, okay, if you want to open a bank account tomorrow, that is a massive pain in the butt, right? So let's say you bank at BNZ and you say tomorrow I want to come to Anz. That would be sensible thing to do. Let's say you want to do that. Not biased at all or you know, Kiwi bank or you know, any bank you say you wanted to come to us. If you want an argument you would go through what we would behind the scenes called KYC know your customer and man we would put you through the wringer. Like we'd want multiple evidence that you live at the household. You say, you know, photographic evidence of your passport. I mean there'd be just endless stuff that would go on and it would take ages, right? You know in India they've done KYC and they've got given they've got to every person measured their right thumbprint and so all you need for anything in India is your right thumbprint. So in three minutes they can onboard you on the bank. You just put on your right thumbprint and you're done, you're good to go.

Incredible.

It's incredible. And then the third thing they've done is they and this is what a lot of emerging countries are doing. They say, well don't worry about fixed line phones which go straight to mobile, right? So give you an example, we built a new house at home we don't have a fixed line in our house. And that's why, by the way, political polling, I think, is getting really difficult because in the old days we'd do it off postcode. So if you live in, say, I don't know, let's take Croshish. Okay. If you poll in Fendleton and say to 100 people, who are you going to vote for and who's going to win the election? I'm telling you, that thing will come back and say national and it'll be like 98%. But if you go to particularly poor suburban Christchurch, I don't know, you can pick one of them. It might be a bit out of date. Let's argue Aranui, it might be. 70% of people are going to say it'll be Labour on the Greens right now, within Pendleton and within Aranui, you'll have people who vote either way, other ways. But largely it's socioeconomic. So that's why landlines were important. Now they've just gone straight to mobile phones. So just to give you an example, how many mobile phones, iPhone 14s, you know, Apple iPhone 14s a day do you think they're selling in India a day? So here's the answer. 780,000 a day.

I mean, it's just mind blowing. You sort of sit there and go, how could that even be true? But the answer is, it is, because even if you sell one to every Indian, it'll take you five years to get round them all and you'll be onto iPhone 17 by then. Right? So what happens is about a billion Indians earn two grand a year and they're all of a sudden out there, they're running little businesses, they're doing little things, they're just starting to do stuff. And instead of urbanizing and having a command and control system, which the Chinese did, and said, here are all the SOEs, and we'll permit what you can do. And we won't. And we will, and we'll force businesses to be set up here or whatever. The Indians are basically saying, we'll just empower you and where you go. So it is kind of incredible. But they are literally growing. Well, in nominal terms, they're growing at about 15% a year.

How does that compare to New Zealand?

We're at negative.

There we go.

Right. So, you know, we're not even growing even. And when we're off, when we were like, in theory, you know, risk of pumping my own tires up when we were. When I was prime minister and they were Calling us the rock star economy. We were growing at about 6% and that's off a really low base.

India is like smashing it.

Oh God, there are three and a half trillion dollar economy. There'll be seven trillion in six, six years.

Incredible.

So I mean that's what's happening. I mean I still think Asia is going to be the place of growth. I'm really worried about Europe long term doesn't mean you can't make money out there but it's just got lots and lots of problems and I think the United States actually in demise and I'm a massive fan of the US like I've always worked for US banks, we own a house in the us. I really love the us. I watch US news every day. I watch it on my iPhone or whatever. But so I'm not negative on the us, I'm the opposite. I'm actually really pro us But I just think in the United States who's got such massive problems, I think in terms of just very briefly on the war in Ukraine, it's a really again a really complicated, I mean kind of not enough to be dangerous and so not enough to probably be insightful. But the long short of it is.

If you just go all the way back and say.

This is how leaders in some. There are a number of ways why leaders get support. So in westernised democracies it's that they improve your standard of living. Right. So when we all go out there and we say oh we really care about some particular issue anti smacking gay rights, there's a million of them. Can even often be the environment. Believe it or not, yes, there are pockets of voters for which that is their number one issue and that is what they worry about. But for most people, despite everything you think it's four issues. The economy, law and order, health and education. I expect the government to set up an environment where I can get a job and a job can be created. I expect my daughter to be able to go out to a nightclub on Saturday night and not to get raped on the way home or my son not to get king hit. I expect my wife to be able to be safe in her house at night if I'm away on business or if I'm on my own and she's away on business. I expect my children to get a decent education and the kids from the poorest backgrounds to go to a school where it will, they'll have the opportunity to succeed in an egalitarian society, you know and I expect grandma to be able to get the hip operation when she needs it, that's it. That's what we measure things on. In some of these other countries, it's very different. And so the way they get things to work is eventually, like, in a place like Russia, where they seem to just thrive on, you know, being downtrodden and living in the hardship. And I guess if you live in Siberia, that's your lot in life, right?

They want to be strong leaders that say, don't worry about all the pain you're going through. It's all about the future state. And in Russia's case, Putin's all about putting the USSR back together again. And to do that, Ukraine's a critically important part of that, because Ukraine's the one that's likely to go into NATO and once it goes into NATO, it will never get out. So that's a lot of what he's been around. Coalesce around the flag. I'll tell you one interesting stat about Ukraine. This is, like, kind of wild, I think. So if you look at the moment, if you listen to the radio at all at the moment, you'll hear them talking about the summer offensive, that the Ukrainians are pushing the Russians back and it's sort of working. I mean, Zelenskyy was on the radio this morning saying it's not going quite as fast, but it's sort of working. And so it is incredible. Ukrainians have been unbelievable. No one would have believed they could have been, you know, as organised and fought with such, you know. Yeah, they've got lots of support from the west in terms of weapons, but, man, they've been impressed. So they're pushing the Russians. They're pushing the Russians back. So the question I have to ask is how many Russians are sitting there in these various different city or towns and stuff that the Ukrainians are pushing back? Here's the answer. 200,000, we think, roughly as best we can work out. 200,000. Where did they come from? Right answer. Not Moscow. Right. So 100,000 of them, we think, are kind of Russians that they've vaguely got to sign up, believe it or not, and do this. Right, because they're not even necessarily. They haven't done. Some of them are in the army, but not necessarily. Do you know where the other hundred thousand came from? Prison. They're all in Siberian prisons and there is no mother crying for them if they die because their families have abandoned them a long time ago. So the deal is you get out, you beat the shit out of the Ukrainians and then you're Good to go. Don't even bother coming back. Doesn't matter whether you do or you don't. See you later, you get amnesty.

Wow.

It's kind of scary to think these people are out there en masse and.

Everything rises and falls in leadership. We've talked about it a bit over the last couple of days and we can see that instability. Talking about leadership, most of us in a few months time will have to make some decisions around future leadership for New Zealand election. Coming up with your non political hat on, what should we be thinking about in terms of when we go to place a vote? What should we be considering?

Well, the only thing I always say to people is vote for what you want.

And for people that don't know what they want, because some people don't know what they want, how do they figure that out?

Yeah, well, I'll tell you how. That can be difficult. So if you know anything about polling, right, there's two types of polling, quantitative polling and qualitative polling. So quantitative polling is I ring you up and I say, good afternoon, I'm from Colmar Brunton. If an election was held tomorrow, who would you like to vote for? And you say I'd like to party, vote national. And so they go, yeah, right, fine. And then they do all this stuff, they go and they work out what, all the numbers. I can take you through the magic if you're interested. But that's how they do it. They poll thousands of people to get down to a thousand people. That replicates the New Zealand population, right? That's quantitative polling. Qualitative polling is they get groups of 10 people. Companies do it all the time. Lots of companies in this room will have done focus groups that are qualitative polling. So they are usually 10 completely in political terms, unaligned voters.

And in a business sense it might be like, it might be. They may literally be interested in your view on Palmolive for washing the dishes, right? And they might say, do you have a particular brand you like? And if you go, nah, I just buy the cheapest one at the supermarket. But I wouldn't mind if it smells a bit like lemon because I quite like that. You're perfect, you'll be in the group, right? So we used to pay these people to do these qualitative groups, right? And we would do 60 people, six, lots of 10. So they have to be unaligned. Cause there's no point in getting someone says mate, it wouldn't matter what that nice John Key does, I'm voting for him. Or it wouldn't matter what that nice John Key does. I'll never vote for him. Those people you might as well take out. Cause they're not changing. So you're trying to work out what is the average person in the middle who might one year vote labor, one year vote the Greens, one year vote national, one year vote act, you know, all over the show, what do they think? Thinking, right? So first things first. I used to say to my pollster who used to do this, can you really tell of 60 people? We used to do this every two months, right? Every month, actually. 60 people. What new Zealand's thinking. And you go, no, I go, jesus, why are we paying you? And he'd go, I can do it off 10 people. I just do it off 60 to make you feel better. It is unbelievable how accurate this stuff is, Right? Right. And so basically it's kind of scary on these focus groups on where they're going. And so basically we would do a lot of that sort of stuff. So this is the soul destroying bit of focus groups. We would ask them, and you'll remember, by the end of it, I'd been Prime Minister for eight years or so. We'd say, okay, name anyone in the government. Anyone. Anyone you can think of in the government, right? So to be fair, probably 59 of the 60 would get me, right? At about 45 would get Bill, and then about 20 would get Jerry because he's a big unit and they remember him for being on tv. And a few would get Judith because she'd probably burnt their car. And that's about it. Honestly, they can't remember anyone else. And it's unbelievable. I remember you might know this, but when you read the newspaper, do you know the editorial is the least read thing in the paper? So 8% of people who read a newspaper read the editorial. So all these editors go through and they write this well meaning diatribe every day. No one reads it, right? And so Chris Finlayson, who is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Attorney General, Ministry of Negotiations, brilliant lawyer, fantastic guy, very, very sort of flamboyant guy, he sort of wanders into my office one morning and he goes, this is an outrage. And I what, Chris? And he's a kc. Like, he's, you know, it was a QC KC these days, like his top level. I'm gonna sue these people. It's an outrage. What are you gonna sue them for, Chris? He goes, boom. Throws the editorial on my desk, right? And he goes, the Dominion Post editorial, just ripping hell out of something. He'd Done or whatever. I go, well, Chris, you're not going to sue them because it doesn't look good if the Attorney General's suing the Dominion Post. And secondly, I honestly don't think you should worry about it. And I said, because you may know this and maybe you don't, but 8% of people read in the editorial. And I said, and the other cool thing is last night we got our polling and despite the fact you've been attorney general for eight years, 0.1% of people know who you are. So I said, no one knows you. No one gives a shit about what you're doing. And the only person who cares that editorial is you. So see ya.

I love it.

So then when you ask them, I kid you not, this stuff is soul destroying, you say, okay, name anything big the government's done in the last six months. Anything.

Half of them can't name a single thing, little single thing. And then they get their policy so confused, Honestly, they think Labor's policies are National, National's policies are Labour, the Greens are this. It's like, it's bloody unbelievable. So the answer is a lot of people will go into that polling booth. Not with a lot of, not with a lot of knowledge. But I think ultimately, ultimately, if you really look at the left, right divide in real simple terms in a country like New Zealand, philosophically, the right of politics believes in less government, more empowerment of people, and that people will follow their own beliefs and their own hard work and their own incentives if you like, to look after themselves and their family. And the right, and the left of politics philosophically believes the system's not quite fair and we should take money off some of those people and give it to these people to balance up the unfairness. So by the way, it's not true, you might think, oh, the left cares more about the environment. It's actually not true. We did more to the environment, honestly, I reckon, than the left have done on various science. We tried to put the Kumiaks into an ocean sanctuary and the Moris took me to court to stop me doing it, despite the fact that every day they get up and tell you the only thing we care about is guardianship of the environment. The fifth biggest ocean sanctuary in the world. They legally took me to the Supreme Court to stop me doing it. So a lot of things you think aren't extreme, but that's the sort of. And the problem I always think with politics is there's something seductive about saying, I will give you money to do something right? So you Know when they brought welfare into New Zealand, they brought it in 1935, basically, Michael Joseph Savage was the Prime Minister and he gave a speech and it was because of 200 women in New Zealand at the time that were abandoned by their husbands, right? So it was the early start of the DPB and we had no welfare society, they had no way of surviving and they were on their own. So laudable goal. Everyone sort of guessed. We lived in a society where men worked and women didn't, you know, all that sort of, kind of archaic stuff. So he gave this speech in Parliament and he said, welfare will never be an armchair ride to prosperity. And they named the 200 women that were going to get it and said, this is how we're supporting them. And one day we sit there and go, well, who wouldn't want to do that? But actually, now we know there's 465,000 New Zealanders of working age on a benefit when I was Prime Minister, so you think that was now six years ago? It used to cost a million dollars an hour. Now it'll be probably a million and a half, maybe 2 million an hour.

The single biggest signs of poverty and deprivation sit on people on welfare benefits because, you know, slutories, there's not enough money to survive and they, you know, and they're not bad people. And, you know, and I actually think most people want to work and most people want to look after themselves and there's lots of reasons why they sort of get there, but. So, I don't know, it depends on what you believe in. But I personally believe that people, if you just give people a chance to make it, they'll go and do it. And I think at the start of all of that, and this is the only worrying thing, is you have to have an education system that really works. And I think, again, so much of that's starting to fail. And I'll just give you a real simple example. My wife was telling me yesterday, because I was in Auckland scene, she was just talking about. But she's a hairdresser and the hairdresser is Samoan girl, lovely girl, been there forever, works bloody hard. Husband fixes lifts. That's what he does, he fixes lifts. So she's had a couple of children and so they've been. Basically, she's sort of been off and come back, but she's been working a little bit, but not very much. So they've had to move. They've had. It's a complicated issue, but they've had to move the Rental property they've got. And they've moved to a part of Auckland which is okay, it's not the roughest in the world, but it's not great. So now they're zoned for a school, which is definitely not great. And so she's now saying the child that turns five in a month, they're not going to send the child to school till they're legally forced to when they're six. Because they think even though the kid, believe it or not, she's married to a pakeha guy, she's Samoan, the kid's quite white. He's quite white. And so it's a really marion Pacific school. And she believes, right or wrong, the kid's gonna get bullied and beaten up the school. And you sort of sit there and go, God, you know, this is dire. And I said to my wife, well, can't we just do something to bloody help them? It's not an easy solution to it because they've signed up this rental agreement anyway, we pray and I'll do something to sort them, help them out. But the long and short of it anyway, is that that's bloody hopeless, isn't it? Because, you know, I came from that state house in Christchurch. I came from 19 Holyford Ave. But, you know, because it happened to sit in what was a decile 10 area, now it's decile 9. I went to these fantastic schools, Aoringi Primary, you know, commonman to me in Burnside High School. And it was all great and it all worked and it was fair, you know, so I think, you know, whatever you believe in anything else. I'm. She's getting to fix the education system so that, you know, it actually works.

Well, Jon, two last questions before I hand it over to q and a.1, is this. So the AF8, the Alpine Fault, when it goes off, which it will likely in our lifetime, the modeling is pretty scary. The west coast will be cut off for a couple of months. Without power, Christchurch, most businesses won't be able to function, possibly in the case of that going off in the next year or two, who would you vote for this coming election? A leader that you think could lead in crisis and get us through that crap.

Yeah. So.

You'Ll appreciate this when I give you the answer. So I did a podcast during lockdown, right? So we're in the middle of lockdown, we're halfway through it, and these young guys rang me up, the two of them, the young kids, basically, and they're like 22 and 23 and they go, ah, we're doing a golf podcast. And you know, you're a golf tragic and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, and, and so. But I have had a hole in one, which was on nationwide tv.

Just saying that, seen that, that was good.

As my wife said, what a show pony. Any other person would do it just on a nice afternoon. Nah, you got to do it in front of the cameras. Everyone there, that was good. Anyway, I digress. So these guys go, we just need your help. Would you just do this podcast for us? You'd be our first and we'd get, get things going and we get some listenership. So I said, yeah, all good, no worries, I'll do it for you. What else are you doing? You're in lockdown. I mean, Jesus, locked in the house. So I do this podcast, I ask a million questions, goes on for about 45 minutes. The very last question was, name your celebrity. 4. Who are the four people? You're one. The other three. Who do you want to play with? They can be dead or alive, they can be anyone you want, blah, blah, blah. So I go, tiger Woods. You know, I kind of have met them once, but, you know, we kind of cool to play the Tiger woods, right? You know, and then I go, donald Trump. And then they say, donald Trump. I go, yeah, look, I don't know, I mean, the guy looks pretty crazy to me, but I just want to know what's going on in his head, if anything. So, I mean, if I spend four hours with him on golf course, it'd be kind of interesting just to see what he says. I don't know. Ironically, he's actually asked me to play golf with him and I haven't actually quite said yes yet. But anyway, I said, yeah, Donald Trump, right? Partly because my wife would kill me because she's a great little right wing voter, but can't stand Donald Trump. Different story. Anyway, and then I said, I don't know, Ed Sheeran, he might be kind of interesting guy, you know, blah, blah, you know, it's fine. Okay. That thing ran for three days as the lead story in the Herald. Three days, like, Jesus, there's nothing going. All because I said I'd vote for Donald Trump. If you Google me today, it's still one of the number one stories. It's ridiculous, right? All because they were outraged. Left wing media were outraged. So here's the answer. I'll never vote left. So by definition, I'm voting for nationalists. I've overluxed him. But that's the reason but actually to give him one second view. Chris. I know Chris obviously really well and to be fair I'm probably his kind of mentor I suppose oring my plot. He rings my apple lot. So he was the chief executive in New Zealand. He came out of Unilever so he ran Unilever North America. He's super smart guy. He is. And so people politics is just like perception is reality in politics and so what happens, this is what happens after a while I think it happened like when I first got elected they didn't know me from a bar of soap but labor used to get up all the time and say ah, you know at one point, I kid you not, Michael Cullen actually got up in parliament and said I was single handedly responsible for the global financial crisis because I'd worked at Maryland which I thought was kind of cool. Even my ego didn't and it's pretty bloody big, didn't lead all the way to that. Right. But anyway so but you know what happened was I was up against Helen. It was kind of the end of her run, you know, she only just won in 05. New Zealanders often have change and so they didn't know me but they just sort of. The more the labour got up and said this guy's a bloody, you know, white shoe investment banker, the more people who didn't know me just went well I don't know but the guy's quite good with money and we're going into a global financial crisis so maybe he'll be good for us. You know it wasn't any more complicated than that. By the end of it when they used to write awful things about me, so many people had met me and then they went oh no, he's not really the devil and he doesn't actually have two horns. Now some people really thought I was worse by then so don't worry, I'm not deluded but there was just a lot of people who had met me and so that's the advantage of a small country. So the left have done quite a good job of saying Chris is a, you know, evangelical nut job. He'll be waving and all this sort of shit and you know, doesn't like this and doesn't like the anti women and all these sorts of things and all I can tell you just to give him a one second plug. There's all a load of horseshit. I was on the board of Air New Zealand. He bought an extended paid parental leave. He was massively supportive of gay rights. He hasn't actually been to church for five years. Not that I care, but I'm just not. I don't believe in religion. I believe in religion. I don't believe in life after death. So, I mean, I might be wrong. And if I work out one second before I die that I am wrong, I'll change. But right at the moment, I've met Erin, Convinced. I just think it's all nonsense, don't you? I mean, you know, I'm gonna come back as a rabbit or I'm gonna come back as a cat, or I'll come back as, you know, bloody. Chris Hipkins adviser. I don't think so, Like, I just think it's over, like, see you later. Boom. You know, and so that's what I believe in. So clearly I believe in bugger all, but. But I don't believe in it. But I think he does sort of philosophically believe that, you know, And I always used to say, people, look.

Religion can be quite a good thing. I mean, I create lots of wars, but lots of people like religion because it gives them assurance and confidence and there's a support mechanism. And actually, a lot of philosophical teachings in religion are the right thing. I mean, do unto others as you have others do unto you. I mean, who wouldn't want to be treated equally by someone else? So if you believe in it, I think that's your right. And who says I'm right? I don't have any better information. I just philosophically don't believe in it and didn't come from a household that believed in it. So I just think he's. I think he'll be a really, really good prime minister. And I think when you get to know him, he'll be fair and he'll make good decisions. He's got a pretty good. You have to have a good heart and good instincts to be a good prime minister. And I think. And he'll do that well. And I think, just to give you one simple example, you know, with Jacinda, I quite like Jacinda, actually, and she came in in 08 when I first became prime minister. Her parents. I know her parents quite well, so her parents are national voters, not labor voters. They may have voted labor when Jacinda was prime minister, but they sure as hell didn't vote labor before that. Right. Her father was the number three cop in the police force in New Zealand. And I always used to send a police officer, officer for three years to the islands, and they'd go to, like, Samoa and they'd be the mentor for, like, you Know the Samoan police force or the Tongan police force. So they'd be right across the region. And so Father Ross, I sent him there because he wanted to go. And he rang up one day, it was near the end of his time, and he said, ah, prime minister, Prime Minister, I don't want to come home. And I said, okay. He said, can't you just find me a job, do something else? I said, okay, right. So I went downstairs, saw Murray McCullough's farmer, said, do we need anyone anywhere? And he goes, yeah, New a. Well, there's 1600 people in New Way. More people live in my street than New A, right? So I went, ross, you're going to New A. And so cool. So off he goes, off to New A. And he did a really good job and he really liked it. And God, he was like, jesus, the Labor Party. Don't get me started on the Labor Party type of thing. But see, Jacinda was really the accidental prime minister. She didn't really. The media loved her for lots of really good reasons, actually, you know, I kind of get it. You know, she speaks really well. She's telegenic. She. She did lots of cool things. I mean, she DJed and she's kind of a nice person and things. And so I got it. I actually totally got it. She didn't really want the job. But I think good prime ministers ultimately and good leaders thrive on decision making. If you're the sort of person that likes making decision, you'll be a good leader. If you're the sort of person that goes, oh, God, I just ultimately don't want to do that. And that was her problem. She just. Look how much weight she lost at the end of it. And it was because she herself, I heard her do an interview the other day and she said, I didn't go on Hosking because the stress of him beating me up every day just drove me. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't sleep. So I actually get it. It doesn't make her a bad person. I just think that she wasn't a great decision maker. And that was why, when Covid was the back end of COVID came along, she couldn't make the decision to get out because she thought, if I make the decision and people die, it's on me. But then by not making decision, how many people didn't get a cancer diagnosis or business went broke or mental health issues went through the roof? So every. You don't live in a perfect. Don't have that Luxury of living in a perfect world. I just think Luxon will make those decisions. And I think, as I said, you've got to think about what you want to vote for. And the only other thing I'd say in 2020, it was pretty obvious national was never going to win. And a lot of national voters voted Green, believe it or not. Sorry, voted labor to stop the Greens getting there this time. Labor have got no chance of getting home unless they have a deal with the Greens in the Maori Party. And that Maori party's quite a different Maori party to the one I did deal with. The Maori Party I did deal with. They were actually quite. They were really good people like Tyrone and Peter are great. Pretty straightforward, didn't agree on everything, but actually, you know, they did a lot of good things for their people. This Marrow Party. I just don't believe in a divided New Zealand. I think we're one New Zealand. I think we should get like. At the moment, they're running this big thing in Auckland this week. If you're Mori, you'll get an operation and if you're non Mari, you won't. I don't believe in it. I think that's bullshit. I think if you're sick, you should get it. If you have less money than me, you should get it over me because I can afford to go somewhere else. I believe in that. I. I just don't believe that we should divide the country on race because then we make ourselves racist. We should be proud of the fact that we're a multicultural country built on a bi cultural foundation of mori and pkeh. And by the way, in 1840 we all agreed that that was the right model. And not much has changed in Article 3 of the treaty's pretty clear we're all going to be treated equally before the law. Not some people treated one way and some people another.

Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. David Seymour has a lot to say on that as well. It's been interesting chatting to him recently.

Yeah.

Well, just one final question. So, John, we're gonna fast forward many, many years in the future. You're gonna have many more years in.

Your helicopter fun and Hawaii smacking and something. Don't do that.

But it's your last day here on Earth.

Yep.

And you know, it's your last day.

Yep.

And someone very young, maybe a grandchild or a great grandchild, comes up to you and says, john, how can I lead my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Have big dreams and follow them. And I think, look, I always used to say to young people, I used to go and talk to schools all the time, and occasionally I still will, but they do, obviously, a lot less of it now. But I used to say to them, look, I tell you why most people don't give big things a go. They themselves are not scared of failing. They're scared of what other people will think about them if they fail. So they're not actually that worried about saying, oh, I go out and I sing in the school play, or I go out and I play for the first 15, or I go and do whatever thing it might be, you know, I go to the academic contest. But they're worried that other people will go. If you don't succeed in that, you know, you'll look bad, you're a loser, and you're bad. And. And when people say, you know, no one will go into politics, it's so rough and tumble these days, that's not true, actually. There'll always be a certain group of a type, personalities who get attracted, but equally.

Not everyone's sued to that. But I think. I think I always had. There were always a number of things I wanted to do bluntly, because I grew up in a very poor household. I wanted to make money. And my mother always used to say, who was this Austrian, Jewish refugee? To understand Ruth, you really have to, you know, that would take a whole session, longer than we've had this morning. But she used to say, john, money doesn't bring happiness. And I used to go, sure as hell helps, right?

And I reckon I was right, you know. So my point was, I always thought, right, well, I'm not here for a dress rehearsal, so I want to make money. I always had wanted to be Prime Minister ever since I was 10. And even though I effectively retired from banking when I was earning millions of dollars a year at 40, and gave up the big earning years of my life, you could probably argue. I just thought, when they're lowering me down the box, or the day before they do, will I sit there and say it was a massive mistake not to earn an extra 20 million or 10 million or something, because I had 15 years where I pretty much earned nothing when I was Prime Minister, answer no, because.

You do that job, because you believe you can make a difference, and right or wrong, I'll always. And they will say, you know, you judge your prime minister by whether they leave the country in better shape than they found it. And the question is, did I do that or have other prime ministers done that? And the answer is, it's totally subjective. People who like me, who supported me, will say I did and people who don't like me will say I didn't. So the only real judge of that in some respects can be me, because I'm the only person in my own head that kind of matters from the that point of view. And I think I did. So I'm happy with what I did. I'm not saying I got everything right or everything was perfect. There are things today, if I had another chance, I would do differently, I think, and then probably some other things I'd tackle, but broadly it'd be mostly the same thing. So, I mean, I would just say.

What is the point in just sort of, I don't know.

Getting your way through it and not really doing it. And I think for all the pressure that comes with any of those situations, you know, I don't know, I've got the sort of personality that thrives on that pressure anyway, I think. But I don't know, it's just you want to do things in your life and look, if I. If, honestly, if we get in your little car and go out to the airport and some maniac in a bloody 44 ton lorry carts us out, other than me screaming at you going, james, look out, I will be thinking, fuck, it's been a great life. Like, I have no regrets, you know, like, I've had a great life. I've got two great kids, one great wife, done lots of things I've really enjoyed. And as I say, life isn't about perfection because I could rattle off a million things I've got wrong or things I do wrong or, you know, but we can't have perfection, you know, that just isn't the way humans are built. We're humans and we make mistakes and we get things wrong and we don't have perfection information. And what seems important today might not seem important in two years or two months or 20 years, but for me, and that's what I'd say to people is just give it a go. And it's however you measure success. Success might be that you're economically successful. Success might be that you're, you know, an important person in the Rotary Club. Success might be that you're a great, you know, sports person. Success might be that you're a great mum or dad, you know, it's however you measure it, it's what's important to you, you know.

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you for this morning. I think we should put our hands together for Sir John Key. Thank you.

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