Oct 17, 2026 · 43 min · 14 segments
What does it really mean to help another country—and how do we know when that help is making a difference? Clifford Brown left a successful career in commercial law to spend 27 years working in…
Clifford BrownGuestFayeHostYeah, it was a nice one.
It was like learning new languages.
That was interesting, you know.
Across the 27 years of payload, the reality of professional development leads up to what you have imagined when you first made that decision.
I wrote a book that explains that story I just summarized for you, and I called the book Dilettante.
The agency was essentially the tool that the U.S. government used to do anything overseas that was not military and was not something that just pure diplomacy was going to accomplish.
We were... we were able to fund long-term projects and we would bring organizations into a country to accomplish something that both governments thought would be useful.
And so the range of activities that we worked on just spanned the entire spectrum of human activity.
When the agency was first created, it was John Kennedy wanted some tool to compete against the Soviet Union and to compete with communism.
They thought that the world's population was growing too fast, so they had a lot of family planning activities.
Later it became a concern about food productivity, and there was a lot of research into how to generate better crops and more productive food and agriculture.
And then there was always just a concern about good governance and basically helping other countries improve.
In biodiversity, we helped communities learn about ecotourism and why it was important to protect the rainforest and whatnot.
I could... continue to give you examples for the remainder of this program, but it was so vast a collection of different activities, and that's why I called my first book Dilettante, because I got to dabble in all these things.
Yeah, it was a nice one.
It was like learning new languages.
That was interesting, you know.
Across the 27 years of payload, the reality of professional development leads up to what you have imagined when you first made that decision.
I wrote a book that explains that story I just summarized for you, and I called the book Dilettante.
The agency was essentially the tool that the U.S. government used to do anything overseas that was not military and was not something that just pure diplomacy was going to accomplish.
We were... we were able to fund long-term projects and we would bring organizations into a country to accomplish something that both governments thought would be useful.
And so the range of activities that we worked on just spanned the entire spectrum of human activity.
When the agency was first created, it was John Kennedy wanted some tool to compete against the Soviet Union and to compete with communism.
They thought that the world's population was growing too fast, so they had a lot of family planning activities.
Later it became a concern about food productivity, and there was a lot of research into how to generate better crops and more productive food and agriculture.
And then there was always just a concern about good governance and basically helping other countries improve.
In biodiversity, we helped communities learn about ecotourism and why it was important to protect the rainforest and whatnot.
I could... continue to give you examples for the remainder of this program, but it was so vast a collection of different activities, and that's why I called my first book Dilettante, because I got to dabble in all these things.
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