Ed Chambers

I interviewed Mark Carney for a job. It was 2021. We were looking to bring in a board member or executive who could help us think about entrepreneurship in the context of the global economy. I was asked to interview a guy named Mark. I Googled him. He had a decent CV. In our call after brief introductions, he jumped straight in and said, “I see on Strava that you’re a runner and you live in...” It threw me off a bit. He had clearly done his homework. Borderline stalking. We talked about running for a while. He was good at small talk. He casually mentioned that he runs marathons now and then. Mental note: he does his homework. Also, is he distracting me so I do not get to my questions? I started worrying he would try to schmooze me instead of getting into anything substantive. In my defence, I had done some homework too. I had not stalked him on social media, but I had read several articles he had written. I learned that he leaned strongly globalist and believed that most of our challenges do not respect borders and will only be solved collaboratively. I wanted to see if he could argue against his own position. More specifically, I asked when countries should invest in self-reliance. For context, I explained how, in software, we have learned that purely centralized systems fail in obvious ways. But overly distributed systems fail too, when small issues propagate across too many dependencies. I asked whether societies behave the same way. Are we sometimes too decentralized? When should countries accept less efficiency and invest in more centralization or self-reliance? He smiled. I could not tell whether he thought the question was childish or whether I had annoyed him. Then he broke the silence and said, “This is a great parallel. Give me a second to think about it.” We ended up having a great conversation. That said, it took him a lot of words to make his point. Professional talker. He liked the exercise. I could tell he had spent so long defending global collaboration that he had not fully prepared for this angle. I did not know it at the time, but he was in the middle of writing Value(s), which is essentially an ode to global cooperation. We went over time. It did not faze him. He cared about finishing the discussion. At that point he was improvising, and it felt natural and fun. It was a genuinely thoughtful discussion. I learned a lot. In the end, he did not join us. But we all wanted him to. When I see him in his current gig, a small part of me laughs that I might have helped warm him up. The more I think about that conversation, the clearer it becomes that he probably did not want his current Prime Minister role. Not in the way people want promotions or titles. Some people spend a lifetime preparing for problems they hope never arrive. When the moment shows up anyway, they step in. Not because it is appealing, but because it is necessary. This just happened to be his moment.

Meanwhile, on Facebook.

Another bad day for Nick, 30 >Income tax up £658 >Student loan repayment up £239 >Rent up (landlord tax passed on) >Tax on savings up >Non working neighbour gets 7k benefit payout

Over the next five years, the OBR is forecasting that welfare spending will rise by £73.2bn to £406.2bn.

House insurance just jumped from $3000 to $5500!!! Almost double. No claims.. no changes.! What is going on?