125. Peter Kyle: AI, grief, and the power of Elon Musk

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0:48Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we've got a member of His Majesty's Cabinet, Peter Kyle, who is the Secretary of State for all things tech and science and innovation. And Peter is somebody we talk about on the podcast quite a lot, actually. And you've got a lot to live up to because I know you listen. We'd say very nice things about you. You'd better be good. I'm only here because you haven't mentioned me for a few weeks and I thought I'd better just turn up. Sorry, yeah. So Peter is a Labour MP down south. His background is as an aid worker, working for charities, working pretty much in the public sector.

1:24a lot of his life after that. Became an MP in 2015. Rising star, we call them. And has now risen to the level of the cabinet. And I think he's seen as one of the hopes for the future. But has also got some really interesting insights in relation to his current job, because AI that we keep hearing about, that is part of his brief. And also very interesting childhood, interesting past, and lots of interesting things in his background. So thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Peter, thank you. Can you begin by, it's a terrible question to ask a politician because often you get a pretty plastic answer, but can you give us a bit of a sense of your childhood and who you are and what you were like growing up?

2:08Oh, I had a great childhood. I came from a very loving family. It's very, very socially sort of mobile. My dad left school when he was 14, grew up in poverty in Liverpool. pool. He left school at 14 to become an apprentice stonemason to his dad. His grandfather was also an apprentice stonemason to his dad. So you get a sense of, you know, the family life there. Well, kind of. Peter, I'm interrupting here for a second. Just tell us a little bit about what being a stonemason means. What kind of stonemason? Well, my grandfather, who I only met a few times, he was working on Liverpool Cathedral. My dad had, you know, five, six, seven people living, you know, sleeping in the room that he was sleeping in it's what he called a slum uh it was something that impacted him his entire life at 16 straight away as soon as he could he joined the navy and he said for him it was either stonemason or navy going forward so he chose the navy uh he credits the drive the discipline he credits so much for that experience came out in his mid to late 20s became a daughter-door salesman for pilkerton glass then moved south which is i've got this accent than his accent when I was going for...

3:16You haven't got a little bit of Liverpool. No, I haven't got any. A tiny bit. No, no, no, no. I was in Liverpool yesterday, Steve Rotherham, and if I had said that to him, it would have killed me. But my dad rang me when I was going for selection in 2013 in Hove, and dad rang me and said, I bet this is the only time in your life you've ever wanted my accent, because in the Labour Party, it fetishises accents so badly. Well, unless they belong to Hatton than those guys. Yeah. So then he moved south and worked his way up from being salesman for a glass company, to owning the company and the same journey was going through our life you know that i was born when he was at the start of that journey down south and every couple of years we were moving home i was born into a home where it was a terrace house by the dump outside bognor regis by the main road with the dump the other side a couple of years later which is the first time i remember it was the end of a terrace uh and you had this sort of garage block that you could learn to ride bikes in a few years after that a new build estate and then on to when i was 12 onto a leafy estate where dad lived until he died last year.

4:16So it was very upwardly mobile, very, very, very driven. I've never met anyone to this day in all the jobs I've done that worked as hard as dad did. And I think that I have inherited his work ethic, sort of the working class work ethic that he had, but also the middle class sensibilities that he gave me through the journey that he took our family on. Rory loves a good working class backstory for Labour politicians. He doesn't quite hit Angela Rainer levels does he Rory? And I don't have came to. Where does Stone Mason and Toolmaker fit in the Labour working class lexicon? I'm proud of everything that dad did.

4:54The journey that I went on that he left for me is inconceivable and he after I won he didn't think I'd win the election nobody did in 2013 in 2015 and that week after the election we were walking down my street and there was Peter Kyle posters in all of the windows down my street. And Dad just said he couldn't stop looking at them. And he just said, isn't it just weird? And I just said, if you look at the posters, you'll see that Peter is written quite small and Kyle is in massive letters. I said, that's your name. I said, that's our name. I said, and this is what we have done as a family. And he was in floods of tears.

5:29And I probably only saw him cry twice in my whole life. so it's a very big thing for the we went through and that was because of his his journey my mum also was actually much closer to in many many ways because she was around more and i was very affectionate with mum and she was very very loving it was a nice childhood i know what you probably want to get to and start talking to about some of the challenges that i had in life but i never want to take away from the fact that actually at its core was a was a pretty sort of what people would appreciate is a standard uh family life one of the the lovely stories here is parents who navigated having a child that was very different to them.

6:09I guess you made very different choices in your life. You will have been different in terms of your academic path, in terms of your commitment to public service. So talk to us a little bit about what it was like for your parents having a child who I guess wasn't exactly like them and what kind of space they gave you to be who you are. I think actually dad in particular found it really difficult me and dad were really close growing up I absolutely idolized him then I started to take different journeys when I worked at the body shop you know dad that was proud of the very traditional approach he had to business and becoming a business person and a successful one and what did I do at 18 I ended up working at the body shops head office this is in 1989 when the body shop was going stellar and Anita Roddick was breaking every rule I mean he hated it you know and there was me coming back with having drunk the kool-aid and just talking about the campaigning the environmental campaigning and all that sort of stuff doing campaigning and making money he hated it then i went to university but as soon as i think i i think for somebody who is self-made having reflected on this so much because my relationship wasn't great with dad for a long time and i think that was really proud of me but as soon as i stepped outside of his life's experience i think he found it difficult being the dad he wanted to be which was to be guiding i think looking back he probably really wanted me to go into his business and actually carry on his business so that he could have carried on mentoring me and caring for me and being part of my sort of development into the future.

7:38And I only really recognize that now. When I ended up doing a doctorate, we barely spoke. You know, we spoke in sort of platitudinous ways for years. Oh, because that was just outside his... Whenever I mentioned it, he would end the call straight away. You can imagine at the time it was incredibly hurtful, very hurtful. And what about being gay? How did you deal with that? So I came out in my sort of mid to late 20s and I'd never sort of ignored it. I never really had a secret life. I never really wanted to be with anyone. And I'd been an aid worker. I'd done things that just because I had a difficult educational pathway, I just wanted to throw myself into really overwhelming and challenging environments.

8:16And I loved that. But as soon as I went to university and I wanted to be with someone, then I started to think who I was. And I just thought, oh, God, it's going to be with a man, isn't it? And it wasn't, I didn't have this sort of moment where rainbows are coming at my ears and it was this big thing. So I went to a tutor that I absolutely loved. He was brilliant. And I said to him, can I ask you advice? You've got three kids. How would you like to be told by one of them that they're gay? And he went, oh, come back tomorrow and I'll tell you and I'll think about it. He said, but just, and I was walking out the door, he goes, but don't do it by phone.

8:45I don't think I'd like it being done by phone. And I went back home and I thought, well, I know now. And now I feel I'm hiding something. This is like day one. I feel like I'm hiding something Dad was in New York My mum by then had a horrible divorce and mum was living in Devon and my brother lived down the road I thought this is ridiculous so I rang them all up one after another and just told them I was gay So you went against what the tutor told you? Yeah, so I went in the next day and he said look I've thought about this I said it's too late I rang him up and told them How did they take it?

9:15The thing that a straight person will never understand is that it is an appalling thing you have to do is to tell someone something so deep and personal, which is also about emotion. It's about sex and your sex life, which is because immediately it's connected to that. And no one actually has to do that. But for someone who's pretty good at getting conversations to where they need to be, there is no natural organic arc for a conversation where you ring a family member and say, how are you doing? Great, thanks. Did you see that on TV? And then suddenly you've got to get it to you saying, I'm gay.

9:48You can't do it. so I kept dad on the phone for 45 minutes and he was desperate to get off the phone for about half an hour of that 45 minutes and then he said I've got to go I've just got to go and I said dad I'm just ringing to say I'm gay and then there's just this long silence and he said what did you just say and I just said this whole conversation is about me telling you that I'm gay uh and he sort of he said oh okay all right no problem um we'll speak later and then he sort of like he kind of hung up but not in a bad way and then later on that evening he called back and we'd had a conversation about it and he just said all the things you would love to hear from a dad he was great mum wasn't so good she struggled with it and she didn't use the right words uh she didn't do it do it in a way that you know the keyword no it wasn't the keyword it was it was there was lots of things you know there was lots of things and by then i'd had my relationship with mum was shattered because of the way that the separation she she ran off with your dad's best friend yeah and that was when i earlier when you were 18 yeah when i was a teenager and that was it was just awful because very very very close was that the other time your dad cried no that was rage that was rage um now i don't remember tears uh in that period and that was appalling very very hurtful um and felt very very personal for me because you ever make it up with your mom uh i did but that That was when I got a boyfriend who you're probably going to want to mention as well.

11:14And as soon as I love the way, you know, what we're going to talk about. The thing is, you have such a reputation of subtlety, Alistair, that, you know, I never know where you're going to go. You're so unpredictable. That's your problem. So as soon as mum saw me and I was in love, everything just melted away. And I learned a lot about parents and families in that moment because she'd spoken a lot about being gay and come up in conversation. she'd said at one point I was just really worried you were going to turn into one of them you know and of course we were getting on well that day and suddenly you just sort of like implode and I just said well for every one of them I think I know what you're talking about you see in the street don't you think there's hundreds that you don't you don't know about and all that sort of stuff it was very difficult and she came from a very different background and had different experiences in life you know so I'm not going to judge anyone that needs to go on a journey so anyway I took Vlas down Vlas was your partner?

12:05my partner a while after we'd started seeing each other and it was the weirdest thing within probably 10 seconds mum had just melted her face her body expressions her everything because she saw in her own two eyes that her son was in love with someone and at the end of the day what parents want is their kids to be happy and all the prejudice or misconceptions she might have had just disappeared in a heartbeat and suddenly she was inviting friends around to to meet me and him and that hadn't happened before and in terms of her relationship i'll just say it was very very difficult uh vlas was very a very very family oriented person and incredibly you know a lot of his warmth which he had in abundance came from his family life that he he just loved and he he he hated the fact that i was estranged from mom and was so angry towards her and he would i didn't know this for a long time but he was calling her all the time and he was bringing the relationship together in his way and but we only spoke about the separation the about 10 days two weeks before she died at the hospital bed when i was sitting next to her and she was asleep and she woke up and saw me there and just said you know with everything i did i know would hurt you most but i hope you know i've always loved you and then i came back to her and said all the anger that i have and through it i hope you've always known i loved you and she said i do it's all we needed for all the stuff i wanted to talk to her about and tried talking to her about, that was it.

13:34It was an incredibly powerful moment. Peter, will you tell us a little bit about Vlas and tell us a little bit about what happened there? I'll tell you about Vlas and I'll tell you about after I lost Vlas. What I won't do is talk about the moment that I actually did lose him because I did one interview about that and it was a very, very, very difficult thing to do. and it took five months of discussion with Alice Thompson in the run-up to doing it. And I thought, I think people deserve to know about what makes politicians who they are and I'll do it once and get it out there. But Vlas was from the Czech Republic, grew up in a very conservative Catholic part of Bohemia and was just very straightforward.

14:25forward he was the same person uh in every situation i mean not a not a not a scintilla of mediation or fitting into he was just the person he was and sometimes that's brilliant at the time sometimes it was embarrassing because he just blurt stuff out in different situations and i feel some shame that i felt embarrassed to start with but he his overriding characteristic was warmth uh he always saw the best in everyone he was fun to be around and was just like a warm emotional blanket in any room that he was in and unbelievably loving unbelievably just straightforward and in many ways had some of those characteristics with with mum when I look back and you know like every relationship particularly someone like me that was coming into relationships for the first time there was no very very very few arguments but you know we we sort of came together very very closely we moved apart over the years but we were together for almost eight years and then you know i got the phone call very early one day uh like 5 30 to say that he had died and then there was a lot of stuff that happened afterwards because of police investigation and all the sort of horrors that go with that kind of thing and your life just literally implodes i am someone who's been an aid worker i'm naturally quite resilient you know i've always had very very robust mental health so even when it happened i was completely surprised at just how devastating it was to my brain to my sort of emotional life uh the fact that my hands were just tremoring the whole time that i had lost complete control of my emotions so i'd be walking down a street for weeks and weeks anywhere any situation and suddenly shaking with with tears and uh and so forth so i was really surprised at just how devastating it was it gets into you know that kind of grief and it gets into every part of your body and that's the bit i will talk about because i think we don't talk about grief in this country very much and thanks to you and others you talk about mental health but i think that the recovery and resilience building that comes from those experiences is something that i would be comfortable talking about but the actual events and and so forth is is something which you know i i managed to talk about once and that's it that's it yeah when you talked about this grief being kind of overwhelming how long does that go on for and how different was it to when you lost your your parents oh very different i think all grief is different.

17:10I don't think there's probably in the whole history of humanity been two people who grieve in exactly the same ways and have the same impact. But the funny thing is I could feel it happening. When the police officer called me, it was like I had shards of glass going into my brain and then just because bits of my brain weren't talking to each other anymore. And you know when somebody says something, does something, you've got to do something like, you know, even turn a shower on. You're not coordinated in the same way. Nothing is working in the way that it should nothing your thoughts don't complete you know your thought process takes you to different places everything is dysfunctional it says that's psychosis to me and well i i wouldn't know but that that's maybe it is maybe it was for me but i could feel everything just just pulling apart and fracturing i could feel it happening and i knew that it was happening in terms of how long it was i knew in that very first day that i would need help i knew that i wouldn't recover from that alone in the very first day that that happened uh and in that day you are barrel rolled into all sorts of difficult moments you have to do some formal things and and the like and you're just a zombie um i went back to my best friend was waiting for me he had lost his wife um and he'd been married for uh 18 months and she was uh 32 six months earlier he was waiting for me and took me back to his home and you know he just said you're shaking you know and my head was twitching and everything it was it was just unbelievable you know just how far you know i sank so i had a very good friend who is a consultant in a and e alley we were aid workers together back in the day i spoke to her and we had a conversation about lots of different things and then she said what can i do and i said you can find me a grief counselor uh she called back a couple days later and said could you speak to diana here's the number when you're ready and i did but of course before you get there as well you know six days later my mum died that was very different mum's in my arms uh and her husband's arms when she died and i went straight out to the car park after mum had left us and rang diana and just said i'm peter kyle and then just absolutely just started sobbing sobbing sobbing a couple of days later i went to see her for the first time and i sat in front of her and she said the very first thing she said to me was what i'm gonna say now it's gonna make you really angry because the whole point of what we're doing is we are going to get you back to a place and it'll be a very different place that you were in before because life will never be the same again but it doesn't mean that you can't build something back and the whole purpose of building back is so you can fall in love again because you've had it you can have it again and that is what we're going to get back to and she was very practical she you know week after week you know in some weeks i couldn't talk i couldn't say a word but you know twice a week to start with then once a week and you know slowly slowly and secondly a personal trainer i know it sounds middle class but physical and emotional and uh pete my trainer and diane i wouldn't be able to do what I do now without them.

20:24Peter, thank you for being so honest and open. And listeners who want to learn more about the story and Vlas being killed and many other things can read it in that interview that you gave at The Times. One of the things, of course, that echoes with what you're saying is that you've now put yourself into public life. And there is a sense of real, I hope this transition works, real grief and anxiety about what's happening to the world order. I mean, we feel like we're in a very, very uncertain time. People are mourning all these things we took for granted over the last 80 years about democratic values, about the far right in Europe, about NATO, about the International Alliance.

21:07And I guess one of the things I want to get you onto is how do you get that balance between realism about just what a crisis the world is facing and just what a big lift europe now has balanced against the sense of hope and optimism and coming through it the world is always changing and every generation where there is a generational shift and there is there is one now is really challenging i mean people accept change but find they know that change is happening but people normally find change quite difficult because you have to wake up thinking acting doing things differently than you did the day before so it's unsettling for me in this job and you know i think being part of this government you have to understand well for me to get through uh days not just in this issue but lots of different issues you have to understand where you have agency and how you can use that agency wisely but not get overwhelmed by the things you can't have an impact in if you can focus on the things where you can then you can really find ways to absolutely maximise what you can do.

22:13Now, I think if you look at the way that Keir and this government has acted in really difficult circumstances on a whole range of different things, I hope that puts into perspective what we are trying to do because every day around the world at the moment there are very big things happening, sometimes very disruptive, and we are constantly asked to commentate on everything. But what we see in Keir is this real determination to make an impact where we can and to make that impact positive and deliver as much positive change as we can with britain you know post brexit in a world where the polar sort of relationships or polar areas are just shifting in ways that are so rapid and so profound and we don't yet know because these are very new forces in historic terms we don't know where all of it is going and that's where i think you know everyone who comes to us speaks in certainties about the trump administration will mean this and you know putin will do that you know we know from histories how things will play out to a degree but actually these are quite unpredictable times and we have to use the agency that we have very very smartly on behalf of the british people right now and i I think people listening will already have sensed that you're somebody who's pretty open and pretty emotionally intelligent and empathetic.

23:36And you triggered me there because you mentioned Brexit. And I've managed to get through the whole interview without even getting there, Peter. How can I put this? I know what you think about Brexit. And I know how much of a thing you think, how bad it was for the country and so forth. But if Rory and I start to talk to you about Brexit now, we know there is a government line and you have to stick to it. And as you were saying before we started, I was very much always in favour of the big government line. How do you stick to it, right? Undersatement of the century there. Before you went wet. I'm not wet.

24:09I'm not wet. I'm just a bit more. Rory thinks I'm getting very left wing. I don't know what I'm becoming, but I'm definitely not wet. He's just becoming wet. What do you mean? What's wet? Oh, honestly, I do listen to the show. And? Oh, come on. Let's not go there. Come on. Go back to Brexit. I'm sorry. You cannot call me wet. am I right Peter that he's getting more and more left wing no I don't think he's getting more left wing I think he's just getting more I don't know there's no sort of cause that he doesn't think government should just adopt and make number one that's absolute bullshit it's not you get a campaigning email and suddenly it's like that should be number one priority for the whole government and we should put taxes up to pay for it and make the education department the sport department I mean I do listen.

24:53Sorry that's been my position for 25 years. Yeah that's because you read it in an email from something. I know that emails existed when I first advocated Sport B5 education. Anyway shut up. Oh he's back. This is the alley I remember. We've woken him up. Let me carry on. So but how do you feel when you know that people like me are watching you And I know that you are delivering a line that you have to deliver because that's the government line. But actually, if you were a totally free agent, you'd probably say something very different. There's very, very, very few times that I have had to deliver a line that I would disagree with more than a couple of degrees.

25:36So take the Brexit, your example, which triggers you. And it's a very triggering subject for a lot of people. And this is a good example of it. I put my heart and soul into that campaign and it was emotional as well as philosophical and practical. But I grieved for leaving the EU the day that we lost the 2019 election because that was the day we lost agency. That hung parliament became a landslide parliament against us and there was nothing I could do anymore. And I grieved for what the Labour Party had done by absenting itself from where the country needed us to be. I lost all hope of being able to steer towards a better deal, a better outcome, whatever.

26:20So when we actually left in January, you know, like two months later, I felt nothing. I literally felt nothing. Because at that point, I'd grieved because it was inevitable. And all I was thinking is, what is next? And what comes next? At that moment, the whole political landscape changed. And I think as someone who is of my politics, you have to live in the moment facing forward. Even if you're two weeks behind trying to catch up for two weeks and then face forward, then you're not where the public needed to be. So the landscape changed and I changed with it, taking my values and principles with me, applying it to the new landscape we're on.

26:59And I think the same approach happens in government. And I know there's other issues that we'll talk about, the difficult things we had to do. but that is how I approach these issues. So when I talk about Brexit now and Britain and the EU and Britain and the world and everything, actually, if you look at the big issues facing the EU and the UK and the world, Russia, Ukraine, China, China policy, how that's changed in 2015, from the golden age to where it is now, or 2010, you'd think of the rise of AI, you think of online harm, you think of all these big issues that are rattling around the world, you know biomechanics all these great opportunities but also challenges not one of them was there as a priority in 2016 and yet some people just want us to think about what we've lost i want to make sure we mitigate the things that we need to mitigate but we need to be rigorously focused on the future because that is the way that we really start rebuilding not just with the eu but without others is the risk though peter actually that you sort of jump to 2020 and then you get stuck in 2020.

28:02Yes, of course it is. I mean, I would say that the real time to be thinking about a much closer relationship with the European Union, some form of customs union, some whole new architecture is now the real risk is that you think, oh, I lost that in 2019. That's old news, we've got to move on. And what you can't see is that the direction that Trump's going in, the direction that Russia's going in actually means that now is the time to reimagine completely, not just Britain's relationship to Europe, but how Britain, Ukraine, Turkey, Norway could all relate to Europe. I think it's a good example.

28:38And I would say that I've leapt right to where we are now in 2025, because if you look at the tonal relationships in the EU, fundamentally changed. You know, just in the last two weeks, I've met four EU commissioners and I've done the rounds of EU commissioners since I first got in to this post, which is only seven months ago. Commissars, as Mr Vance called them. But if you look at what we need now, it is functional relationships, the effort to find common ground. There's a lot of work that Nick Thomas Simmons is doing on the long term rebuilding. But when you say customs union, because of what's happening in the world now, to rejoin the customs union is to take years of negotiation.

29:17Years. You're not going to suddenly pop in. Not with courage and imagination. I mean, you may be missing, in fact, an extraordinary opportunity. And it will require a referendum because of the lack of the change in sovereignty. There'll be lots of different issues. And also, there's lots of practical reasons why there are things there that the EU want from the UK. And there's lots of things we want in that relationship as well. And exploring them all, we can do that now. We can put food on people's table right now in the weeks ahead, rather than just trying to go back to the big existential things, which have very, very big, profound sovereignty issues.

29:51We need to be focusing on the practical issues because that's what they want us to do. It is also what is in the best interest of Britain now. I think there's a really interesting question here, and I think it goes to the heart of the way that the Labour government thinks about things. You get the sense that Starmer's personality is very much let's focus on the here and now and the practical and the small things. Let's not get into big ideas, big structures, big visions. And I think there's a risk that actually, we've entered a world and a politics where actually we need really big structures, big ideas, it feels more like 1948 feels more like the kind of world that Jean Monnet was dealing with.

30:30And that the risk of looking at, you know, let's do the practical everyday things that we can do, and of course, appeals to me, and that's quite a sort of small C conservative message, is that we won't achieve the transformational change necessary for European people. European security, European economies, or indeed our entire strategic independence. What I do agree with in what you just said is that I think one of the reasons for Brexit was that the public knew something quite big was wrong with the country, that we needed a sort of big refresh, and that the Remain argument felt very incremental.

31:06It didn't feel modern and fit for the sort of moment we were living in. yet the Brexiteers, obviously they weren't encumbered by any sort of need to anchor it in, you know, anything written down or anything like that. So it did feel like a big solution to a big, what felt like a big problem. Don't forget, we passed through an economic crisis. We were in the middle of a migration crisis. They had a big solution to what was a set of big challenges. And I do accept we face a lot of big challenges as a country, but the nature of them are very different. You know, we've inherited public finances that are genuinely, you know, extraordinarily difficult.

31:41You know, we've come into government and the tax threshold is ridiculously high. Borrowing is high. The amount of waste I found in the department I went into was unbelievable. Unfunded commitments. You sound like Elon Musk. Well, this is interesting. His friend will come on to that. I hope I get to talk about this. We'll come on to his admiration for Elon. Oh, I do hope we can talk about what I've been doing about regulating appropriately and tackling, you know, efficiencies and the like, which we have to do, but there are ways of putting your own values and principles into doing it that show you can achieve it in different ways.

32:11I would argue that right now, the really big thing we have to do is lay the foundations for what we can do in the future, because we don't get the basics right in running our public services, rebuilding our relationships with our neighbours and our key allies. If we don't get the economy and the foundations of the economy really strong, we will have nothing to build on right now. and just you both care about international politics and our bilateral and multilateral relationships incredibly strongly. Just imagine Britain as we inherited it after 14 years of the Tories and what they put us through and then we came up with a big idea for the new global order and then we went and tried to sell it to people.

32:47It would be ludicrous. What we are doing is rehabilitating Britain and we are showing through actions, not just words. I said this to all of the European and American and other sort of leaders and people leading different parts of governments from other governments that don't judge us on our words, judge us on our actions, and that I can talk through actions. And that's a great thing about being a government that does things. Yeah, great. But sometimes leadership is about, or we use the V word, the vision, but it's about setting a long-term sort of frame. And I do think there is a massive opportunity right now for it.

33:20You can call it what you want, a kind of defence, security, and economic partnership, forging a new relationship that we don't have to bang on about Brexit the whole time, though I probably will a bit, but actually just set out something for the future and i i think it's wide open there right now and i think we're always right is there's a danger that we just feel let's just go day to day let's be a bit incremental and and that's the way to do it and that's kia's style and that's fine i've got no problem with that anyway let's let's let's move on you just you put words into my mouth and then moved on yeah i know i know because that's why i'm sharing it now let's talk about you we mentioned another trigger word musk but let's just talk about ai because that was a huge part of your brief I think here is the fifth prime minister that we've had to say that Britain is going to be a global leader in AI.

34:04Now, before we get on to the how, just if you meet somebody who literally knows nothing about what this whole artificial intelligence debate is about, very basic to Mrs. Woman on top of the bus, what are we talking about? We're talking about machines that can learn human attributes and behaviors from the data that we produce in our daily lives. And it can bring it together. And because of the combination of vast amounts of data and huge computational abilities through what supercomputers can do these days, you can analyze that data and you can recreate human-like behavioral thinking. and the latest models that are producing artificial intelligence are now doing computational thinking in things like biology chemistry maths but also general cognitive thinking at phd level and very soon we will reach what they're calling and what they're aspiring to artificial general intelligence agi whereby artificial intelligence will be able to think cognitively along the breadth of human thinking above the way that most average humans can do.

35:20And what that means is that they can't just do one task you ask it to. It can follow a train of tasks through a logical process that actually reflects a human-like sequence of thinking to deliver the kind of outcomes that up till now only humans can do. Okay, Peter, Alistair, quick break and then back in a second.