567. Who Really Benefits from AI and Will Data Centres Decide the Midterms?

24:16Rory Stewart:Almost none of those emissions are coming out of data centers. Those emissions are coming because you and I and everybody in Britain and Europe are buying Chinese and Indian industrial goods. I mean, China's world's largest exporter. In fact, actually, it's a really good example of what's likely to happen here, which is we pat ourselves on the back. We don't have any power generation stations. We're not burning any coal. We just get the Chinese to burn the coal for us and we buy all their T-shirts anyway. So what will probably happen here, we pat ourselves on the back. We haven't built a data center in Scotland.

24:46Rory Stewart:We'll still all be on our chat GPT using all the energy out of a data center in UAE and feeling good about ourselves. I think right now, though, Roy, I think right now I meet a lot of young people in particular who just say they are not using chat GPT. they are not using AI. I think this thing is developing at a pace that the AI companies really don't understand yet. Look, you're absolutely right. I guess the point I'm making is that it goes to this thing which the writer trying to do at the moment is saying, well, climate change, yeah, yeah, yeah. The climate change is real. The climate crisis is real, but there's nothing we can do about it.

25:19Having spent decades saying it wasn't real now, yeah, it's real. There's nothing we can do about it. We have to adapt. Okay. This is a new thing. we have to mitigate and adapt as opposed to challenge. I guess what I'm saying is that, yes, you're right. You can point to, you know, but it's a bit little whataboutery. You can point to things that use more. I still fly and I feel guilty every time I do it. I do still eat meat occasionally. But I think with this, it's the fact that this is happening at a time that the climate debate is falling down the agenda, when the poor ought to say to us and the wildfires we had over the summer ought to say to us, it should be going back up the agenda.

25:57Rory Stewart:Let's say the UK had a strong position in software development and in drug discovery, pharmaceuticals, which we do. And let's say that suddenly you find American and Chinese companies are racing ahead because they're able to use clawed code to do the work that a mid-level coder could do in 24 hours in about 10 minutes. And you're beginning to see productivity and coding in those companies using that AI going up by 30%. Let's say the Chinese are able to use alpha fold technology on protein folding in order to develop a whole new generation of pharmaceutical drugs. Are we saying in the UK, we are going to ban our companies from using those products?

26:46No, I hope not. I hope not. But if that is happening...

26:51Rory Stewart:But then how would we... Then I think the question is, are you saying, okay, we're going to continue to compete and build all our systems on the back of these AIs? We're just not going to host any of it. We're going to let US and China host the data centers and we'll use their products. I'll go back to the point I made earlier. If the AI companies and the governments that are supporting them, Trump now full in, the British government is all part of the critical national infrastructure, therefore they get easier planning, etc. If they were able to make the case that that is where AI is going to take us, then I think I and others would feel less alarmed.

27:29But I don't believe, I'm just reaching the point where I don't believe that these great benefits will keep being talked about are going to be greater than the risks that we fear. And I'll tell you, there's a book that I read years ago, but somebody sort of, when I was talking to them about this, said, you need to go back and read the book. You probably read it, 1873?

27:50Rory Stewart:No, not read it. It's by a guy called Leaquat Ahmed. Oh my God, yes, sorry, I have read it. And it's a wonderful book. I'm sorry, and he's a wonderful man. So it's called, it's 1873, The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World. And the reason I was alerted to this is because somebody sent me something of Ahmed speaking about the AI situation now. And he was comparing it to the railways back in the late 1800s. And if you go back to the reason why it's called 1873 is because that was when the Vienna stock market collapsed. A few months later, Wall Street was crashing. There was global panic.

28:28We talked about Andrew Bailey, the current governor. The Bank of England back then raised interest rates to their highest ever. Many countries defaulted on debt. And it was basically the first global financial crisis in history. and what's most relevant to this is if this is just a massive investment boom focused on speculation the speculation back then was railways it was construction everybody got swept up in it and it had catastrophic consequences so the big bankers like the rothschilds okay lots of charlatans lots of grifters interestingly i went back and looked at the book yesterday two of the voices who were really warning against this were Karl Marx and Mark Twain.

29:12Okay. They were very, very spectacle. Anyway, it went tits up. We ended up with two decades of deflation. We ended up with the 19th century version of populism. Because of the Rothschilds involvement, we ended up with a huge wave of antisemitism. This was all about Jewish financiers. America turned in on itself. European nations turned in on each other and free trade became a dirty word.

29:37Rory Stewart:And I'm not saying that history is repeating itself, but I'm saying it might. So there's another thing which we haven't talked about enough, which is the possibility that all this AI investment is an enormous bubble like your 1876 railroad bubble. And there's a lot of evidence that that might be the case, which is why you suddenly find that the share prices on some of these companies will tumble incredibly. And they really matter. I mean, as we've said before, the US is 70 % of the global stock market. And these hyperscalers are more than 30 % of the US market. So if these hyperscalers that are going to be spending$700 billion in the next two years, begin collapsing, and one of the reasons they might begin to collapse is that their business models require getting more and more and more capital.

30:25Rory Stewart:So in order to get these improvements, they've gone from GCSE maths to A-level maths to winning maths olympiads. They're doing it by spending hundreds of billions on compute. And there may, in the end, just not be enough money out there or not enough people prepare to put money in. And there are other warning signs. You see these weird circularities where one of the AI companies will be putting money into NVIDIA, a chip company, and then other money will be coming around the back in another way. Now, their profitability is staggering. Anthropic has gone in very short order in just over a year and a half from making$300 million annually to making$14 ,000 million.

31:08Rory Stewart:So that's the other side of the story. I mean, one of the reasons all the money's coming in is these companies are generating huge amounts of revenue. If it all explodes, we're all in real trouble. But then I guess the question again for Andy Burnham is, what does he do about it? I mean, what's he supposed to do to insulate ourselves against this? Are we all supposed to go into cash? Are we all supposed to invest in the European stock market because it's less AI heavy? And another question that's worrying them, that the valuations could collapse, as you say, because of financial engineering. They could also collapse because it might turn out that the Chinese are able to produce a model that is far, far cheaper and does 99 % of what these models do and is open access.

31:48Rory Stewart:access. So if you suddenly end up with these models being really easy to make, and the stuff becomes a commodity like electricity, and this is one of the big fights, this is where US-China becomes interesting. Is this a race where if you get to the finishing line first, it's winner takes all because you've built a super intelligence and you have a company that now controls the whole world's economy? Or have you just invented something like electricity, where in fact, everybody ends up getting it really cheaply, and there's no particular advantage in being anthropic or open AI as opposed to Chinese, that too could make the bubble burst.

32:21And the answer is that none of us know. The answer is that none of us know, including these guys who are doing it. And just to give us listeners and viewers a sense of the scale of this. So Columbia Business School, they reckon that AI build out is going to account for almost 3 % of economic output in the coming years. So that's even more than the railways and all that stuff represented in the 19th century. As you know, I've been traveling around European Union for the last few weeks. So I got back home to discover all the kind of mail that gets left here. And I think you do as well. I subscribe to the printed version of The Economist.

32:56Two of the three copies of The Economist that were left lying on the map were about AI. The cover was AI. Could AIs become conscious, pretty terrifying thought. And this one, how AI is breaking the state. And this is really interesting piece about Britain and about how our crumbling court system is under even greater attack now because everybody has access to these large language models, which could write complaints for them, work out loopholes in the law. And so that was a very interesting thing. And then up here, you mentioned China, lessons from Chinese AI. So I then went off and went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at China and AI.

33:41And there's something really interesting about this. The Chinese seem a lot less, the Chinese people, insofar as you can measure it, but there are ways of polling in China, seem a lot more positive about AI than we are in the West. which that is the one argument that makes me worry okay because as you say if china if this ends up being the bee's knees and all it's meant to be and that all the ai tech bros say it will be then if china's out in front on its own we've got a really really big problem but interestingly there was a very i found a comma where i read this but it might be in the new york times but it was a piece about a court case in China where a man launched a court case because he lost his job to AI.

34:30And the court upheld his complaint. And it led to the state through the state media saying, this is the attitude that we should take to the loss of jobs. And the state media ran a big thing about the really clever firms will take AI, take its benefits, but then use it to generate work for other people currently not working. Now, this is in a place with 17 % youth unemployment. Is that the attitude of Donald Trump? Is that the attitude of Elon Musk? No, it's not. Is China being more careful about this than we are?

35:07Rory Stewart:I think this is an amazing question. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back from the break, let's talk about what we're going to do about it. And actually, this is an opportunity to draw people's attention to two miniseries I think we've done, which are very relevant to this. Part three of the Andy Burnham miniseries, which is Alistair and Steve Rotherham looking at the question of how Andy Burnham thinks can be very relevant to his policy. And then I've done a miniseries on AI with Matt Clifford. If people are interested in talking through these issues a little more slowly, what you'll find is that although in this conversation with Alistair, I'm coming across as the AI promoter, actually, all the way through the miniseries, I'm portrayed by Matt Clifford as the AI pessimist, AI doomer, who keeps talking about what the catastrophic impacts could be.

35:50Rory Stewart:So to listen to both of those miniseries, become a member at therestthispolitics.com. Much more to get into after the break and do look up this miniseries.

36:06Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Rest This Politics. For me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Here we are in this very intense debate around AI. Okay, so, Alisa, you made a really good point about costs and benefits. And the point you're making, I think, is that the benefits of AI so far are pretty partial, and the future benefits are a little bit uncertain, whereas the costs are pretty clear, or some of the costs are pretty clear, particularly the costs in terms of building out data centers, making people like Elon Musk far richer, and certainly creating new methods of warfuel. fair cyber attack and potential threats around bioweapons before you get into what these things could be doing in five years time.

36:48Rory Stewart:Okay, so my comeback is this. I think you're right. I think if you were Trump and Xi Jinping and you looked at this stuff, I think now would be absolutely the time to say, stop any more frontier development until we've digested what we've got so far. May actually interestingly already be too late. One of the arguments that the tech bros are currently running when I'm saying, you know, this stuff could get out of control, do hugging face incidents, become autonomous, mount its own cyber attacks. And ultimately, you know, there's this fact that they talk openly about a 20 % chance that it could extinguish humanity, could kill us all, right?

37:26Rory Stewart:So one of their answers is, well, it might be too late already, might have already got out and hidden itself in a whole series of codes in a way that stops us from hitting a kill switch. Okay, let's assume that's not the case, or let's hope that's not the case, because if it's too late it's too late um the uh so the argument would be stop now you've done a lot of interesting stuff you haven't begun to apply properly most of the advances that you've achieved over the next three years so let's take a breath let's not train any more cutting edge frontier models let's try to get the most out of them and let's run safety tests and the safety tests we run now will be much better than the safety tests we would have run three years ago because we know much more about what these models are capable of and what they're not capable of.

38:09Rory Stewart:And let's try to model in a more sophisticated way. Now we understand more about these things, what their economic consequences, what their social consequences could be. Saying that, of course, is a big, big problem for the US economy. Because the valuations of these companies, you know, Anthropoc people think may IPO at$2 trillion. That's a company that didn't exist four years ago. There's nothing like this has ever happened in the world. And if you say they're not going to be training the frontier model. So obviously their entire growth story is based on the story that their next models are going to be much better than this.

38:42Rory Stewart:But, and this is my big kicker, I'm afraid the risk that we face in Britain and Europe is that although the costs outweigh the benefits, we could well end up in a world in which the benefits go to the US and China and the costs are borne by us. So they end up being able to build the$2 trillion companies. They end up being able to build billion dollar companies with two employees. They end up taking the cutting edge on pharmaceutical research. They end up being able to develop the most powerful weapons in the world. And we end up with the costs. We end up with the data centers. We end up with the risk of a 20 % chance extinction of humanity.

39:24Rory Stewart:We end up with the cyber attacks. We end up with the bioweapon attacks. We end up with increasing inequality, not just between Elon Musk and the average American, but between an American-Chinese economy growing gangbusters and our economies being entirely stagnant so that we end up essentially like a country in the early 20th century that didn't have electricity when other places do. Well, first of all, a 20 % chance of extinction, that covers all countries of the world, larger than small. So it's not as if we would be the only losers in that. Look, I understand where you're coming from. And I totally get that this is a very, very difficult challenge for every country in the world that is not the United States and that is not China.

40:09There's no doubt about that. And they are all busy trying to catch up. My worry is that they're all doing so on the basis that they're having to inhale and agree with what thus far actually, I think, has been an enormous amount of hype. We have not yet seen the benefits. I've not seen anybody explain them to me. I've seen them in very, very generalist terms. But at the moment, what you're seeing is companies who cannot quite believe their luck, that they're growing at the scale that they are. And when you mentioned, Rory, trillion dollar companies with two to 10 employees, for most people in the world, that's a terrifying prospect.

40:47Because that basically says, there's no work. Yeah, well, let me come in on that.

40:51Rory Stewart:And that's something that we really have to push again and again and again. One of the reasons why this is so scary is that when they say these models will make companies more productive, generally what they mean by that is they'll be able to replace people. So that's unemployment, but it also carries the security risk because what they're saying is these models will become more and more autonomous. They'll be more and more able to operate without humans and without human supervisions. So they're very, very excited at the moment on recursive self-improvement, which means the AI improves the AI, and the AI coding improves the AI coding.

41:36Rory Stewart:Now, that is what their growth story is built on. That's what their productivity story is built on. But the other side of that is that, of course, is where the danger is. because the danger of a bad human getting hold of a nasty weapon is completely different to the danger of an autonomous AI being able to do this stuff itself without human supervision. So I think one of the things you're saying there is you can't have your cake and eat it. You can't say this is going to generate enormous productivity and growth by replacing humans and also say we're not going to end up with enormous loss of white collar jobs and have more and more risk of autonomous attacks.

42:12You know, maybe if there's one good thing to come out of this right now, I think this backlash is going to do fundamental damage to the Republicans in the midterms. And I think the Republicans are beginning to see that. So let's just talk about that a little bit. So you've got 4 ,000 data centers across the US, you've got another 3 ,000 in the planning process, okay? You talk about the numbers, by the end of this decade, tech companies are going to put $7 trillion into data centers. $7 trillion would feed every single person in China for three years.

42:43Rory Stewart:Okay. And it's also why these companies are starting to feel and operate like they're more powerful than even major nation states. And by the way, on the numbers, Rory, back to Nepal, did you see the initial donation from the United States government, which used to have USAID to nepal for the clear up no five hundred thousand dollars no it's unbelievable it's very difficult to understand the scale of investment we're talking about and why if europe wanted to do this it would have to do it with canada and south korea and japan and everybody and borrow a huge amount of money yeah we're back to the middle power strategy but just on the backlash so in august last year in a poll 43 percent of eligible u.s voters supported the construction of data centers in their vicinity.

43:31Okay. 42 % against. This August, 15 % in favor, 75 % against. And I was talking to a Republican strategist. He's an anti-Trump Republican, but he's still involved in Republican campaigning. And he said he has never, ever seen an issue like this. In that, you can be doing surveys. You can get a three-time Trump voter who says, I hate these data centers. you then get somebody who's massively pro-abortion who's against the data centers you can get evangelicals you can get anti-vaxxers you can get internationalists you get rural and city he said it's the first time he's seen non-voters actually starting to say this is the issue that will make me vote so there's been a and he said he's never seen anything quite like this issue

44:19Rory Stewart:for turning the dial and then you've got this response haven't you which is that increasingly Josh Shapiro, who's running for re-election, has announced a moratorium. There's been talk about moratoriums in Texas, which is one of the big build-out places. And you're absolutely right, Republicans are falling over themselves to say, we're not the guys in favor. And then in Michigan, the Democrat candidate that we've talked about is perpetually quoting these figures on white-collar job losses, on existential risk. But there's another story that we haven't covered this week, which shows the problems with this, which is the meta settlement.

44:55This is the latest in a long-running number of tech cases, the big tech companies, where they have been forced to pay$18 billion.

45:05Rory Stewart:So$18 ,000 million. Yeah. But Rory, I can remember when I worked in newspapers back in the day, we had libel insurance. I reckon these companies,$18 billion to trillion, You've just been talking about the trillions that these companies are going to put in. $18 billion, to you and me and to most of our listeners, is a phenomenal amount of money. I think to Meta, they've probably got it on insurance. Almost regardless of insurance, one of the indications of how little difference it makes them is that when it was announced that they were going to have to pay out$18 ,000 million in compensation, their share price went up.

45:43Rory Stewart:Because the market was thought, oh, well, that's not much money. So the story here is it's taken 21 years, 2 ,600 lawsuits. And in the end, all they've managed to do is to get Meta to remove a like button from teenagers. That shows you the problems that anybody's going to face trying to regulate these companies when it comes to safety AI. Now, if it takes 20 years, 2 ,600 lawsuits to get a single removal of a like button, and incidentally, Meta's now come up and said, if we're doing this, we want our competitors to do it too. And there's been a resonating silence from people like TikTok that have no interest.

46:26Rory Stewart:Yeah, of course there has. Final thing, which has interested me on this, is that we often think that these people are driven by pure evil. It's much more banal than that. What they're driven by is accountants. What happened in this case, it seems, and this is what decided the case, is they found a bit of paper in which Meta had been told that if they could acquire a teenage member, the lifetime value of the teenage member would be$350 compared to an older member whose lifetime value was$180. This is actually something that's not a million miles away from being in the podcast world, where you're told that if you acquire a member, it has a lifetime value, right?

47:04Don't give away our business, Moral, for God's sake.

47:07Rory Stewart:But I think it's worth, you know, maybe being a bit more sort of frank and open about because it shows you how horrendous consequences follow from what starts with a sort of quite innocent sounding business decision. If we can retain younger people, it's going to be worth more for the value of the company. But I mentioned earlier on about tobacco and fossil fuel industry. So the fossil fuel industry has spent billions telling the world things that they know to be untrue. OK, the tobacco industry spent the equivalent of today's billions telling the world that smoke. You remember the adverts? Eight out of nine doctors smoke Chesterfield.

47:48You know, this embassy, the cigarette the dentists approve of. I mean, just total lies. OK, we all went along with it. We in newspapers. So we didn't cover stories about cancer. Why? Because there were massive advertising in the newspapers. And just on this Meta thing, so this was a result of 29 states, so more than half of the American states, suing Meta for creating addictive harmful products for children. The case lasted four days because Meta wanted out of it fast. So 18 billion over 10 years in 29 states is pocket money for these guys.

48:24Rory Stewart:It's absolutely nothing. And we still don't really know from this case what you're supposed to do about it. Because the problem with our current legal approach is that we tend to think the way to solve it is to remove the like button, for example, from teenagers. And the problem with that is it just incentivizes, a bit like the hugging face attack, companies like Meta to work out how to get around that problem and retain people without a like button. What we should be doing is trying to define not the technology, but the outcome. We should be trying to say what we're interested in is avoiding bullying, unwanted advice, surveillance, whatever it is we're trying to do, and set the liability around the outcome, not around the question of the design.

49:10Rory Stewart:Just before we move on back to Nepal, let me try to sort of draw this incredible conversation together. So I think what we've demonstrated is why this whole thing is something that politics is struggling with absolutely worldwide. Firstly, as you say, when you look at the hugging face attack, most of us talking about it don't actually understand the technology. And even the people designing these systems can't look into the black boxes in the way in which you might imagine, because in the end, it's a series of weights and parameters moving around that generate this stuff. And exactly how they do that still remains a bit of an art form and a mystery.

49:52Rory Stewart:Secondly, we can't even agree on what the benefits of these things might be or what the risks might be. And a really good way of illustrating that is, are we looking at something which is about to make America and China the most powerful, unbeatable economies in the world? Or are we, as you suggest, potentially looking at a bubble? In which case, they get hurt the hardest. In which case, they get hurt the hardest. We all get hurt, but they get hurt the hardest. Are these things where it's going to become a commodity that we can all access and we don't need to get too stressed because we're going to be able to get open source models from China so it doesn't matter if Trump hits a kill switch and exclusives from the American models?

50:29Rory Stewart:Or are we going to need these frontier American models in order to run all our defense and security? If that, what do we do about it? Do we build data centers? Do we try to build our own chips? Do we try to get together to build our own AI models, which is going to be, as you've just pointed out, so expensive that we can't even imagine where we would get the money to do that? And is there any way of dealing with, and maybe this is my final point, which I think you've been getting at all the time, which is you're talking about moral hazard. You're talking about the benefits going to a very small number of people, mostly in Silicon Valley, who are going to become unbelievably wealthy, and the risks being borne by the rest of us, which is essentially the story of the 2008 financial crisis, right?

51:15Rory Stewart:And it's actually the story of the Iran war. Trump doesn't need to care too much about the consequences for what happens in the Strait of Hormuz because he's creating his own gas. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg famously can retire to their bunkers when the whole thing goes wrong. And I know I said finally, but there's one more thought I had when I was talking to you, which is you said one of the problems is communication. They can't explain what the benefit of this stuff is. My experience, and I know a lot of these people, I've met a lot of these people, I've talked a lot. I spend a lot of time with some of them, a lot of time with some of them.

51:46Rory Stewart:is that their personalities and their education is very strange. They are mostly engineers, and many of them at the top levels now are people who have been computer science researchers, who've been interested in artificial intelligence for 10, 15, 20 years. They are basically interested in building it for its own sake. They're also very interested in making a lot of money, but one of the reasons they're interested in making a lot of money is that it allows them to spend more money on building their models, right? So if you were to say to them, get one on the show, what is it you're doing? They would quickly say, oh, we want to solve all the maths and physics problems in the world.

52:25Rory Stewart:The general public is not interested in that. The general public is interested in the question, what does this mean for my energy bill? Is this going to make me healthier? Are you going to cure cancer? Am I going to lose my job? Not, have you managed to design a godlike superintelligence that's going to solve all the questions of advanced physics. Yeah. Well, when we were driving around Europe, one of the books we listened to in the car was the Sebastian Malaby book on Dennis Hasebis. You know, he's a very, very interesting guy and very, very clever, no doubt about that. But I think that book was one of the reasons why I felt this thing is not in a good place.

53:04Because I thought, I'm quite enjoying listening to this and hearing about this guy, but I'm not feeling comfortable about where this thing is heading because I don't think they really know. And if you then have politicians alongside that, so as I said at the start, Trump, all against, it's all a scam. Then he thinks, oh, it's a scam. I'll be in on that. He's now in it and one of the reasons he's making billions is because of his connection with AI. The AI buses must be looking at him and thinking, he's the best sort of, he's not a cheerleader. It's just that he doesn't care about the consequences.

53:35Rory Stewart:Well, maybe let's just finish with Nepal because I think there are two things which really relate to everything that you've been saying about the problems of not just climate in general, but the way in which we structure climate finance. Firstly, as you say, Nepal emits very little. Its neighbors, China and India, emit a huge amount and are contributing much more to climate change. It was a champion in green renewable energy generation. In fact, the Trichuli River where this happened was where some of these enormous as hydropower plants were meant to be built, which were not just going to make a huge difference to clean energy, but also save the Nepali economy.

54:13Rory Stewart:But it also raises a question of the whole way we've designed compensation. So when we talk about thinking about adaptation and how to deal with countries which suffer most from climate change, we have a measurement problem. People like Bangladesh can do quite well because we have really, really good data on rainfall and flooding in Bangladesh, stretching back over many, many decades, and rainfall is very frequent. What happened in Nepal is an event that happens once every 100, 200 years. We don't have a data sent. It's not frequent. And actually, it's very difficult to exactly prove the contribution of climate change to that.

54:52Rory Stewart:That means that when they go to international climate conferences, places like Bangladesh are well ahead of them. So if what climate's going to do, and it seems very likely, is create more and more unpredictable events, then I think we need to completely change the way we do development finance from saying you get the money if you're unduly vulnerable to climate change to saying you get the money if you're poor. We need to go back to a much more traditional development model. Because I don't think that our climate models, even with all the benefits of AI, and that's one of the things that these tech bros keep boasting about, that it's going to help us to do both mitigation adaptation climate change even these best models are not going to accurately predict what will happen to countries like nepal yeah i was reading um somewhere over the weekend that one of these lakes that is sort of sitting there and they're really sitting there worried that it's going to explode doesn't even have a name the lake doesn't have a name because it's so remote and you know we're talking about lake ontario most big lakes have a name okay this lake has no name what i found most awful about the whole thing i mean watching the film was just horrific there were two things that sprung to mind the first was i i saw a listener report in the world service about how china was reporting it very very differently they were not showing the worst of the footage they were showing the great rescue going on we've all seen that shot at the tibet border of this i don't think you've seen the one where there's these buildings it's like a disaster movie it's just it's just horrific and we know that when they say there are several thousand still missing most of those sadly are going to be to be dead but i just think the extent to which internationalism i mentioned the the united states initial donation for help being half and 500 000 i mean that is just the richest country in the world sees this is leading their news the same as it is in every country in the world that says to me that's a government that is saying we don't give a shit we really don't give a shit again i know i'm obsessed with these numbers, but that is one ten thousandth of what used to be their annual development budget.

56:59Rory Stewart:You know, it's not 5 % or 1%, it's one ten thousandth of what used to be their development budget. Yeah, I think they've upped it a little bit. And then let's ask Britain, you know, what's Britain contributing? I think it's several million. But still not enough. Tiny. We would have put in, in the past, 50, 100 million in the past into something like this. And I know that because I was a development minister in Nepal after the Nepal earthquake in 2015. And I think we put in many tens of millions, approaching 100 million into that. And that killed almost exactly the same number of people. So it's a really good way of holding the British government to account too.

57:30Rory Stewart:It's a like-for-like comparison. I totally agree. And I do think, I think there is a special place in hell for people. I mentioned the fossil fuel lobbyists, people like Richard Tice. You think it's funny that we have wildfires in France because that means the grapes will go better and we'll have better sparkling wine in Kent. And then people who on this just kind of shrug their shoulders and say, well, you know, it's a long, faraway place of which we know little. But the fact that such a catastrophe can happen with little or no warning, and you're right, there are no warning structures because they don't have the infrastructure for that either.

58:06When you read things that say there's a city, I can't remember the name, where bodies are literally just washing up on the beach. okay there are bodies being found that are floating as far as india this is an area of

58:20Rory Stewart:nepal that i know reasonably well and one of the things that's happening now is as you talk about these new lakes and rivers the risk is now moving further and further south away from that border region it now looks like there's real problems that may then erupt so we may not have even said the beginning of this isn't and as you get further down into new accords and towards katmandu the population massively increases and the risks massively increase yeah and also what a what a baptism for the i mean a relatively new prime minister who's elected in march remember we talked about at the time he was a six he was a sort of product of the gen z protests against the old regime balendra shah 36 pretty young guy to be dealing with this and of course dealing with it in the context of i mean china a lot of this happening in tibet so xi jinping they had a minute silence before the cabinet meeting he said he's deputy there to deal with the thing on the ground but we are seeing that contrast between China which continues to have very controlled output about what's actually happened very controlling about the debate and whereas we are able to see this just utterly horrific stuff that consequences are going to be with us for years and the thing I worry about is that with all that you know this from your time at DFID is that these things happen, you have the emergency appeals, you have all that stuff, people focused on it, then it's going to take years and years and years to recover from this.

59:44And Balendra Shah, the Nepalese government has calculated they're going to need about $4 billion for reconstruction. Well, they're not going to get that if America's giving $500 ,000.

59:55Rory Stewart:Well, thank you, Alistair. That was a really interesting, good debate. We went a lot of a lot of directions there. When we come back for question time, we're going to look at Iceland. We're going to look at UK-Russia. We're going to look at UK-US. We're going to look at conferences and maybe a couple of fun questions from listeners as well at the end. See you then.