517. Is Trump Plotting Regime Change in Cuba? (Question Time)

22:08Rory Stewart:Yeah. I mean, the whole thing's complete nonsense because as somebody who did a few randomized control trials when we were doing cash transfers to the extreme pool with Give Directly, a sample size of 300 isn't big enough anyway. I mean, no statistician is going to derive any information from 300 divided into groups of 60. I mean, it's meaningless. So I don't even understand what the hell they think they're doing there. Almost certainly somebody said they wanted evidence and then someone in the civil service said they didn't have enough money to run a proper sample size. So now they're doing a nonsense.

22:37Rory Stewart:The other problem is that it makes it feel, I'm afraid, to somebody like me who's feeling a bit grumpy about this, as though they're under pressure from the social media companies. Because we know that was the case with Malinorskas. He said as soon as he started to do this, all the big American tech companies ratcheted up the pressure on him and try to shut him down. I'm worried in this case that the government is very dependent on these big American tech companies for their next generation investment. You remember the whole Trump visit was about these companies bringing in billions of dollars of investment to the UK.

23:08Rory Stewart:And the reason they're not taking the Malinowski line is that they're desperate not to offend the tech companies. Well, do the right thing, I say. Right, Rory, you're our sort of resident slag off the Green Party person. Sean asks this question. Hi, Rory and Alistair. I wanted to pick up on the idea that the Green Party is far left. I'm 27, says Sean, and in every election so far in my life, the centre or right has won. I consider myself left wing, but I don't think my views are fringe. Invest in the economy, fair attacks, nationalised industries. Many of these ideas would have been fairly mainstream before Thatcher.

23:43Since then, the centre of gravity has shifted so far right that the principles of social democracy and Keynesian economics are sometimes labelled extreme. Even if the Green Party goes a bit further, should principles like wealth redistribution and ensuring greater economic firmness really be considered far left? Oh, you like this bit. Many thanks. Sean Davis brackets running to be a local Green councillor in the upcoming May election. So in the interest of balance, could we have the view of the Labour councillor in your seat

24:11Rory Stewart:and the Tory? It's really interesting, isn't it? Because, of course, you'll see if reform listeners wrote in, which they don't very much. But they're also very, very resistant to the label far-right. They absolutely hate the idea they're far-right. They would say their ideas are basically in line with a lot of the population. Common sense. It's interesting how the epithet far is doing a lot of work here. I guess, look, there's a trivial point, and there's a more important point. Trivial point is we're trying to describe a British politics that's gone from a two-party politics into a five-party politics, and we're trying to describe the fact that reform is right for conservatives and green is left to labor.

24:50Rory Stewart:I think the more important point is this question around for both green and reform about populism, which is they're not awfully good, either party, about explaining the costs and sacrifices that would be involved in their solutions, that they're very good at talking about the problems. And that's one of the reasons we just interviewed Yanis Varoufakis. And I was quite struck by the fact that he's somebody who's definitely on the left, but much more than the Green Party is very, very clear about the fact he doesn't think wealth taxes are going to make any real significant difference. He thinks, you know, there might be an argument for doing morally, but it's not going to sort out the public finances.

25:31Rory Stewart:And that the kind of changes you would need to make to the British economy are going to be really, really painful and are going to hit people in the pocket. And that's exactly what populists on left and right never want to admit. Yeah, I mean, I don't view the Green Party, because the Green Party is quite a complicated alliance now, because Zach Polanski has become the leader and the most high-profile person within it. His politics, I'd say, are quite different to other reasonably well-known Green Party figures. I don't see them as far left. I just think they're not very credible. We saw that in our interview with Zach Polanski.

26:02I think they're very credible on the economy. I thought we got to question, Joshua, what was the purpose of the protest against the far right when the far right are not in power? the protest against the far right, I suspect, Josh, because a lot of people feel very, very worried that the far right is on the march. This refers to a very, very well attended march at the weekend in London. And it was specifically a march organized to protest against the threat of the rise of the far right. Zach Polanski spoke at that event. And I don't know, I just couldn't take him seriously because he was just looked like a guy having a really good time bouncing around a stage to some music.

26:37Now, maybe that's just me being a grumpy old man. But if the Green Party are to be taken seriously, I think they have to be serious. And I think that too often, the policy perspectives that they put out there is not serious. And you're absolutely right, it is a form of populism. And the series I've done with Liam Byrne, we're talking mainly about the right. His book doesn't address the populism on the left. But it is a kind of mirror. It is about saying, well, this is a problem, and it's a terrible problem, and we shouldn't have that problem. Therefore, we do this to deal with it. So yesterday, Farage and Jenrick were out and about saying that, you know, we're going to make it easier to fly.

27:10We're going to take the price down of flying. We're going to reduce your fuel costs. Well, how and what trade-offs are you doing? They never feel that they have to do that. Look, I think the Green Party, they are a real threat to labor. I was in a very good school the other day, Northampton Academy, and it's one of a chain. And they had several hundred kids listening in the room. And then they had 7 ,000 online coming in from different schools. I could only see the ones in the room, but I did one of my votes, as you know, I love. So these are all students, school kids who are going to vote for the first time in the next election.

27:41I asked them, how many of you will vote? Virtually every hand went up. And then later in the talk, I said, you know, how many of you think Keir Starmer is doing a good job as prime minister? And it was very, very, very, very, very few, alarmingly few from a Labour perspective. Now, they liked Zach Polanski. I didn't do a vote on Polanski, but they kind of you know can't he be a bit more like zach and a bit more radical a bit more this a bit more that now that shows that his strategy is working okay but i don't think it's the policies he's putting

28:09Rory Stewart:forward as strategy for government i was so intrigued i was so intrigued um in our interview with him that you know him saying to me basically at the end listen you know i i could have known those economic statistics if you'd warned me in advance but but also that it didn't really damage him at all i mean i thought you know revealing that he didn't really know the difference between the deficit and he wasn't sure about the top rate attacks, I think could have been really damaging for a politician 20, 30 years ago, but it hasn't had any effects on him at all. It might. That's one of those things, though, that's why, I mean, I said at the end of that interview, he needs to go away and get decent advice and get people around him and have good answers to that.

28:46Because in a general election, it is the sort of thing that can trip you up very, very quickly if you don't have those pretty clear answers. But maybe we are. We often say we're always a few years behind America in our political campaigning. Maybe that is the awful road that we're going down where truth doesn't really matter. Sums don't have to add up. You can get away with making mistakes. But I don't see them as far left. I just see them as slightly lacking, well, severely lacking in credibility on the policy front. Should we take a break?

29:14Rory Stewart:Yep. Take a quick break and then back for more.

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29:52welcome back to the rest of politics with me alistair campbell and me rory stewart now bruno rory wants to know who do we think is more dangerous to the world right now

30:03Rory Stewart:putin or netanyahu it's uh it's quite a question i mean that endangering the world in very different ways so let's let's start with putin who i do think is is objectively the most dangerous directly for Europe. He controls 20 % of a European country. It's a war where 1.2 million casualties have happened. He's got this enormous nuclear arsenal and ballistic missiles. He's made it clear, as Tim Snyder said in our interview with him for many, many years now, that he wants to increase Russian territory right into the Baltic. And we're in a very dangerous situation because that message you read out from Trump signals the US administration that for the first time really at least since 1945, is signaling that it's not really that interested in protecting Europe against Russia.

30:50Rory Stewart:I mean, there's something I keep picking up on here, which is sometimes these Republican foreign policy people I've been arguing with over the last three days are saying, when I say, what are you doing in Iran? They say, well, it doesn't matter because Ukraine's fine, Europe's fine, you can handle it yourselves. And sometimes they're, of course, saying the reverse, which is Europe isn't fine. Europe needs to spend much more in defense. You're in a much situation. The Israel point, though, is fascinating because Israel, of course, is justifying these attacks on the grounds that it's vulnerable, but it's probably doing these things because it feels almost invulnerable.

31:20Rory Stewart:In the short term, Netanyahu, if you said, you know, what could go wrong for Israel and what's happening, the answer is ultimately, he probably doesn't feel there is any existential threat to Israel. There's no way that the Gulf countries are going to repeat the Yom Kippur War of 74. He has a nuclear weapon. They are the strongest military power in the Middle East by a country mile. And therefore, a bit like Trump, what he's doing in Lebanon, what he's doing in Gaza, what he's doing in Syria, and of course, what he's doing in Iran, he's partly doing because there isn't much direct consequence for him.

31:54Rory Stewart:He's insulated from very much blowback. And that's really being felt by the Gulf because they feel that Israel's offering the choice of either signing up to basically join all of Israel's campaigns, or have their economies shattered, marginalized, and pushed aside. Anyway, over to you. What do you think? Well, I think it's an impossible question to answer. I mean, Netanyahu at the moment seems to me to be pursuing in Lebanon a similar approach that he pursued in Gaza. We said on the main podcast that I'm not sure that he and Trump are fully aligned in terms of objectives. I think Trump probably deep down does want the Iran war to end because it is causing so much trouble for the American economy.

32:42Whereas I think Netanyahu wants the time and the political support and the political cover to keep going. I guess the other two things you have to say about both of them in very different systems in a way is just the survival instinct. I mean, Putin has now been a dictator for so long that he probably has to survive until death. Dictators reach a point where if they lose power before death, it usually ends very, very badly for them. And I think he sees himself as being around for a long, long time. Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel. He was the first Prime Minister of Israel that Tony Blair met when he became Prime Minister in 1997.

33:19Now, OK, he lost power for some of that period, but he's the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel by a long, long way. he's been written off many many times and i guess the danger this is where trump i think is in the same in the same boat is that the danger that they represent at times is that when they are in a political bind they are not scared to do things that we would deem to be very dangerous very risky and potentially catastrophic in order to keep going. I mean, I don't think it's impossible that Nanyahu wins the next election, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago.

33:58Rory Stewart:What US and Israel are doing together is they seem to be indifferent to the second, third order consequences for other people, the Gulf, Europe, Asia, for what they're doing in Iran or elsewhere. all that matters to them is what matters to them. But that would be fine in a way if it was all about their own selfish national interest, if they weren't also dragging us all along in their slip stream and demanding that we all endorse their wars, participate in their wars, fund their wars, provide flights for their wars, and attack us ferociously when we don't join them in operations which are objectively harmful to us and beneficial to them.

34:43Rory Stewart:So how long can these relationships be sustained? Because support for Israel is no longer as bipartisan as it was in the US. It's certainly less than it was in Europe. The traditional focus on Israel's right to exist is now balanced with a strong focus on Palestine's right to exist, at least insofar as European countries now recognize the state of Palestine in a way that wasn't true before. And we now have stories like Itamar Ben-Gavir, who's the minister of security in Netanyahu's government, wearing a noose signifying the death penalty as a lapel pin and driving through legislation which effectively would impose very rapid execution on Palestinians convicted of terrorist acts out of the West Bank or Gaza and going against a very, very strong tradition in Israeli democracy, which has been very reluctant to impose the death penalty since the foundation of the state.

35:46Rory Stewart:The celebrations of it were pretty revolting as well. Sorry to relate this back to Trump, because like you, I suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. But I think it's important to understand that this idea of the strong man leader and what we now have as an international network of it, When you see things like, for example, Trump as president saying to the president of Israel, for heaven's sake, Herzog, pardon the man. He's fighting a war for your country. Pardon him. Likewise, the fact that they're getting, we talked yesterday about, you know, getting them getting involved in our politics. You've got the Hungarian election on April the 12th.

36:21He sees Orban as a fellow strongman. Orban, another one for whom corruption is just the sort of name of the game. And so therefore he's backing Orban. Vance is due to make a visit there. Rubio has already made a visit there. So this is an international network of the strongmen. And one of the things they want to be strong about is never being punished for the things that they do wrong. So, I mean, Putin is a fabulously wealthy man. He has presided over poisonings, murders, executions, assassinations. He has broken international law in all sorts of different ways, but never gets called out for it by Trump.

36:59by Trump. And then, of course, the other thing you saw with Russia this week was the extraordinary, and it seems to be real, tapped phone conversation between the foreign minister of Hungary and Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. I saw a great comment this morning from somebody who said that if you're an intelligence officer reading a transcript of this conversation, you're listening to a controller with an agent. And so it's a network. That's the thing we have to understand. That's why the Rycroft report that we talked about was so important, because this is a network that is trying to undermine the source of democracies that we thought we could take for granted.

37:36Rory Stewart:There was something I've been thinking about a bit, which I haven't heard your views on, and we've had a couple of questions on, which is Restore Britain, which is the Rupert Lowe party. So we've had a question from Stuart, is the rise of Restore a bigger threat to reform or to the Overton window? The Overton window, I think, is the idea of shifting in what's acceptable, a general sense that things are moving to the right. Katie, Nigel Franch clearly doesn't fancy being questioned by you and Rory on leading. Would you ever consider putting Rupert Lowe under the spotlight? So my understanding is Rupert Lowe restores broken away from reform, has much more explicit support from Elon Musk.

38:14Rory Stewart:So you can see Rupert Lowe's tweets being boosted by Musk and getting millions of views. What's your sense of what it will mean to have a sort of another party competing in the reform space? I think it does pose a problem for Nigel Farage on various levels. The first is, as you say, now, there's a part of him, I think, that didn't mind having Tommy Robinson right out there as a kind of violent exponent of the sort of politics that Farage believes in, because he could make Farage look a bit more reasonable. Rupert Lowe, it seems to me, is parking himself somewhere between the two. Rupert Lowe, I think, has genuinely what you and I would define as extreme views, where, you know, we talk about far right, far left.

38:56I think he has pretty extreme views. I remember when he was chairman of Southampton Football Club and because Clive Woodward worked there for a while and I knew him quite well. So Rupert Lowe asked me when Southampton were playing Burnley, he asked me to have lunch with him before the game and I went and had lunch with him. And I think I recorded in my diary, I don't think I've ever met anybody quite as right wing as this guy. He's very, very, very right wing on the economy, on all sorts of things. And clearly the other reason why it's a problem for Farage is he does seem to have this historic inability to hold teams together, which I think ultimately in politics does matter.

39:30You've got to be able to hold a team together. And Farage is very much likes to be the main guy, doesn't really like to be threatened or challenged. And Rupert Lowe, he fell out clearly very, very, very, very quickly. Just a second question though, Rory, because I think he's right. I mean, I've been trying to get Nigel Farage to come on the podcast, even though some of our listeners didn't want to hear him, because I think he is an interesting consequential figure. You can't get away from that. And I get the feeling he doesn't want to come on. He keeps sort of fobbing me off and saying, well, maybe.

39:57And now he's stopped even replying. But what would you feel if we got Rupert Lowe on? What would you think about that?

40:02Rory Stewart:Yeah, let's get him on. Why not? Why not? Why not try to get a sense of this guy? I mean, I think if we have the confidence to interview Zach Plansky, have the confidence to interview Rupert Lowe, I think we should go for it. Listen, just final one on that. Do you think there's a chance if, given Farage's problem in holding parties together, that he's going to lose Robert Jenrick, that Jenrick will drift over to Lowe or drift back to the Conservatives or head off in some other direction? I mean, God knows. He's clearly using Jenrick a lot. Jenrick was with him at this press conference they did at Heathrow Airport.

40:35He had a big piece in one of the papers at the weekend. I mean, I find it hard to take Jenrick seriously because he just striked me as being a rank opportunist. But could he really go even further to the right? I don't know. I don't know. And by the way, when we said last time that Farage doesn't want to come on, they said, well, what about all these other characters like Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think Farage is the one that, you know, is probably we would want to interview. So, Nigel, if you or your friends are listening, the offer is still there. But Rory, I'm surprised.

41:07Rory wants to interview Rupert as well. So, Rupert, if you and your friends are listening, that's absolutely fine. Now, Rory, great question here from Ben. Oh, yeah. despite being perhaps the most famous living advocate of walking through his books i think what you mean is despite through his books being the most famous living because you don't walk through books ben but anyway going on rory talks less and less about his benefits and seems increasingly to turn to meditation retreats to find consolation what do these offer him that walking no longer can has rory given up on walking that's a lovely question lovely question and i'm

41:47Rory Stewart:i'm i've applied for another one of my 11 day meditation retreats so i'm going to vanish on you at some point um i you're also vanishing this week i i am i am i am off on holiday should i tell you i've lined up in your stead yeah go on who's it who's who you got well i've decided to bury the hatchet over his continual boasting that only i called at trump as the winner of the election we're going to have Mr. Dominic Sandbrook from the rest is history. Oh my goodness. Oh, well, I'm in trouble. I think I may not be back on again. He's a jolly good broadcaster, that chap. That may be the end for me.

42:17Rory Stewart:I may have to be nice to Tom Holland and try to brush up on my history. You'll be back, don't worry, but it's one week only. So, but what about the walking? But you still walk a fair bit, don't you? I love walking. And I, you know, I, if I had the chance, I'd be going on three, four week walks all the time. but it's true that if you're really looking for really deep introspection meditation if I'm walking for nine ten hours I maybe spend a couple of hours grumbling about my pack or thinking oh am I getting a blister and I get about an hour of sort of being in the zone and meditating whereas if I'm sitting cross-legged in a dark room for 14 hours a day I have more chance to kind of contemplate my navel as they say I can't do either.

43:08I mean, because I used to run a lot. I used to run hundreds of miles, you know, every week. But my knees really started to hurt. In fact, Sophie Raworth, our next question is going to be about cultural recommendations. Sophie Raworth of the BBC has written a book about running, and she's got a section in it about how it's good for your knees to run. Well, it might be, but it bloody hurts my knees right now.

43:30Rory Stewart:I mean, my friend, who's not a friend of yours, but a friend of mine, Matthew Parris, who was a conservative MP and an amazing marathon runner. He could run a marathon in sort of two hours, 20 minutes, I think. But his knees really got destroyed. My mother, 90, is a great believer in the fact that the reason she's able to walk so well is she's never done any exercise in her life. You've heard some of my friend, David Mills, who says that the only time he, the only exercise he gets is walking up the stairs to visit his friends in hospital who've had lots of injuries from running and skiing and things like that.

43:59But, yeah, so are you going to, what about another book, though? Would you do another book of walking across somewhere?

44:04Rory Stewart:I have sometimes wondered whether, you remember, I walked across, as well as walking across Afghanistan, I walked across Iran, for example, and Pakistan. And I wondered whether I could redo my walk across Iran or Afghanistan 25 years later and see what had changed and compare the diaries. But then sometimes I think, oh, fuck it, I've already done it. Isn't it a bit lame to redo something you've already done? You've got kids now. You can't just bugger off for weeks and walk across Afghanistan. You've got to wait until they're teenagers. They don't want to see me. That's the key. There's going to be a moment where they'll be like, F off, Dad.

44:40Rory Stewart:We're going to go and do something else. I do still like walking, but I find that I just, I think it gets aging. I just, my legs get stiff very, very quickly. It depresses me. Well, you've got your swimming. You've got your mad swimming. I've got my swimming. I've got my boxing. I keep fit and what have you. But I used to, whenever I see people out running and really enjoy it, I get very, very jealous because I just can't do. And being overtaken a lot when you're out running, that's so depressing. Because I'm a bit competitive, Rory, a little bit. Just a tiny bit. No, look here. So you can be a little bit competitive to end our lovely question time.

45:14Rory Stewart:Judy, do you have any book recommendations or cultural recommendations, please, for the Easter weekend, Duster? If you're looking for a good telly thing, Gone, starring David Morrissey. David Morrissey, I think, is a really brilliant actor. and it's a story about the wife of a head teacher who goes missing and then it's just it's sort of just tells you know you eventually find out what lies behind that story but david morrissey he's such a brilliant actor and it's so sort of intense another thing to watch mr i finally got around to watching mr nobody versus putin absolutely brilliant about this is about this teacher in in a small town in russia who posts the war finds that they're having to teach propaganda the whole time and he can't stand it and eventually gets out the country and he's a bbc film but it's really well done and then a book the book i read this week is one of those single sitting days you know i said last week publishers stop sending me bloody books i'm getting too many books but this one this is the first book that arrived unsolicited post by plea and it's absolutely brilliant it's called essays on madness a lunatic's guide and it's written it's written under a pseudonym aa fellows And I wonder whether AA is because one of the many, many mental health issues that this lady has to deal with through her life.

46:30She has anxiety, depression, alcohol, drug abuse, PTSD. She's got a whole lot. Beautifully written. And at the end, a little bit like my book on mental health, she tries to give you ideas as to how to deal with it. A lot of them quite similar to mine in relation to music and sleep and all sorts of other stuff. But it's a really nice book. and I love the cover as well. It says, Essay on Madness is a brutally honest exploration of AA Fellow's fucked up mind and her endless attempts to unfuck it. That's really good. So that's good. That's my cultural. Oh, one thing not to watch, Rory, don't fall for hype.

47:08I finally thought, everybody's talked about this Marty Supreme film. We ought to watch Marty Supreme, but a table tennis guy, Tim Chalamet. I didn't buy it at all.

47:16Rory Stewart:Oh, okay. I went to see Project Hail Mary, which I thought was really fun. I mean, it's not hugely serious, but really fun. And there's a wonderful book by Andy Weir, which lies behind it. Have you followed the plot of that? That somebody's going off to space to try to save the world from amoeba that are eating the sun. You see, we're very different in our days. Once you talk about space exploration, does this make me very limited? I'm just not going there. I don't go there. Well, I'll tell you what you would like. And here's another one for you that I think you'd like. Hitler's Beneficiaries by Goethe Alley, a brilliant German historian.

47:53Rory Stewart:And what he's done is he's written a book pointing out just how much economic benefit came to ordinary Germans. He begins with his own grandparents and talking about embarrassing conversations about where their furniture came from. And it turns out to be looted from some house in the Netherlands, probably belonged to a Jewish family. That's more my scene. Exactly. I think you'd like it because it's about how regimes of all sorts create bargains with their public and the way that people care about, obviously care about cost of living and economics and how careful the Nazis were to make sure that all the costs fell on the countries they were occupying, but that ordinary Germans continued to, you know, get their rations, get their food, get their shoes.

48:36Just on the Nazi theme, Fiona and I went to see Broken Glass at the Young Vic, and that's the old Arthur Miller play, which was all right. But that's essentially about an American woman, a Jewish, living in America who just cannot get over what's happening to the Jews in Germany and can't understand why other Jews aren't feeling as passionate. And then she has this kind of bodily reaction to it. That was okay. That was okay. So yeah, I would recommend that. On the Madness book, A Lunatic's Guide to Mental Illness, here's an interesting one for you. She's written it under a pseudonym because, and she says in the introduction, she's got three children, and she doesn't want attention for herself, and she doesn't want to be a public figure, which is interesting on two levels.

49:24One, because it probably makes it harder for her to promote the book, because we all have to get out there and promoting her book, which is maybe one of the reasons subconsciously why I'm now doing it for her. But also it's sort of because one of my big things campaigning on mental health is, you know, the more open we all are, the better it will be. So she's incredibly open in that she tells this every last detail of her life and her mind and her story. But with that resistance to actually wanting to be out there in public, which I completely respect, but it's just an interesting way of doing it.

49:57Last couple of ones from me.

49:59Rory Stewart:Odd Arnie Vestad, who's a colleague here at Yale, who even beats Alistair on the multilingual. I mean, it's unbelievable the number of, he's a Norwegian, but he's got incredible Chinese, Russian, and umpteen other languages, has produced a book called The Coming Storm, which is drawing parallels between the situation before the First World War and the situation today. and it's talking about how a third world war might emerge in a particular america china competition and a real attempt to be constructive it's not just a kind of doom and gloom book talking about why we're doomed but what the lessons might be on how we make war less likely rather more likely so maybe even a possibility for an interview or a miniseries and and then finally because we've asked about easter i'm going to go really left field here with a with something that will really make your toes curl the bible i mean it is basically that so this amazon has produced a a program called the chosen and it's about jesus and i've been watching it but the interesting thing about it i mean i think you might question its kind of um literary ability but it's very very much situated in the jewish context it's very much jesus the jew and of course it's really good at bringing out the the acts of playing uh simon peter playing peter for example as a yemeny jew looks very very arab and it's both interestingly sympathetic towards jewish heritage and jewish culture but really locates the fact that so often we're presented for 2 000 years with Jesus as a kind of white guy with sort of chestnut coloured hair and a very white Virgin Mary.

51:49Rory Stewart:And here is Jesus very much situated in not just the Jewish context, but almost an Arab Jewish context. It makes you think about Islam in a different way, Judaism in a different way. I can hear the Judeo-Christian movement of Maga and Reform getting very upset about this. Anyway, Arnie Vestad, incredible. I think not only would you love him because you'd have so much in common with him speaking umpteen languages. I don't speak umpteen. I speak three. I mean, for a European, that's below average. It's true, actually. It's true. If you were Dutch, maybe you wouldn't be so impressed. Exactly. That's true.

52:26Rory Stewart:Yeah, that's true. Very good. Well, listen, that's enough cultural recommendations. That's enough blather for one week. Yep, very good. I won't see you next week. I'll be with Mr. Sandbrook. Look forward to seeing you when I'm back. And I'm going to tell you all about the Galapagos. Excellent. See you then. See you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

52:52Hey, marketers, listen up. Before this, there was this.

52:58Rory Stewart:Our voice. It's how we shared knowledge, build communities. Well, guess what? voice is back that's why spotify advertising has published a new report the sound on era because audio moves culture forward and if your brand wants to be heard you need a sound on strategy go to ads.spotify.com to download the sound on era and turn up the volume on your business hi it's steph mcgovern here from the rest is money now obviously there are big economic consequences to all the geopolitical turmoil. Listen to us to find out how investors are reacting and whether we're heading to a financial Armageddon. I'm talking to Karen Ward, a Chief Market Strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.

53:41Rory Stewart:Listen to The Rest Is Money to get her take.