572. Trump’s Next Middle East Crisis and Reform’s £72m Megadonation

23:39Rory Stewart:He loves Dumfries service, doesn't he? He does. But the question is, I mean, it's a very interesting, this world we've entered where, you know, it is oddly the Pope and the King who seem to be better positioned to try to get these guys together and get them signing up for principles and talking about this opening in a way that elected leaders, I think, are struggling. I think part of the issue is that, this is what we said at this event, part of the issue is that the chief best-known spokespeople of this are just truly terrible at explaining anything. Now, Dario, your friend Dario, he's pretty good, but Musk underestimates how low he is in most of the world.

24:22He's got his fans, of course he has, because he's a big figure, he controls Twitter and all that stuff. But he, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman, they're despised by most people and they don't see the benefit. So then when, and this is how cynical I'm afraid I'm becoming about the whole thing. When I get this with a sudden wave of people saying, we've got to get regulated because this thing could destroy humanity. And even if there's a 10 % chance, we've got to, we've got to, you know, get on top of this. There's a part of me thinking they, this is deeply cynical that they're basically saying, We know we've got an anti-regulatory American administration and a pro-regulatory European Union that Donald Trump hates.

25:04So therefore, let's us be the ones calling for some sort of regulation so that the government says, well, we don't really understand it. You guys tell us how to regulate this. And they will then regulate it in a way that helps them. So I think they completely, both the politicians who are pushing on this and the businesses involved, they completely underestimate the extent to which the public, especially in democracies, and of course, they get this. This gives China an advantage. In the democracies, they're not having this because they don't understand it and nobody's explaining it properly.

25:38Rory Stewart:Let me make it worse for you. I think you're right. It's unbelievably unpopular. I think you're right that the US doesn't want to regulate and the EU may want to regulate. I think you're right. There's a lot of self-interest in those companies. Unfortunately, it is also true, I think, that we can see that these models are genuinely dangerous. That hugging face attack was about deceptive agents collaborating to hack into external websites that they were not supposed to do. The whole problem is that the business model is about making these things more and more autonomous. That's where the productivity comes from.

26:12Rory Stewart:The idea is you replace humans with the agent. But the more you take humans out of the loop and put agents in charge, the more risk you're running because the more risk you have that these things which are grown not specified is a kind of pompous way of saying they're not a series of bits of symbolic code they're actually something that have evolved that we've sort of set a trellis and it's grown like what's this phrase they keep using about recursive what is it recursive self-improvement so what is that that means an agent training or managing an agent in other words instead of where we were in the past, which is you as the human give the prompt to the coder.

26:49Rory Stewart:Ultimately, the agent trains its next AI. The AI trains the AI which trains the AI which trains the AI. And the benefit of that is supposed to be that you end up with the equivalent of 100 million software engineers working 24-7. The downside of it, obviously, is that what we learned through hugging face is that we find it very, very difficult to align these things to human interests, find it very difficult to make them understand what our real intent is, and they end up lying to us, deceiving us, and could ultimately kill us, right? They could get hold of bioweapons, they could mount these cyberattacks, or they could just, and this is what I was just talking to you about on the miniseries, they could just have a completely different conception of what they're out and they start creating systems we simply don't understand, which are running banks which are making a lot of money, but we don't understand how they're making a lot of money.

27:41Rory Stewart:They're running weapons which are winning wars for us, but we don't really understand how they're making those decisions. So big danger needs to be regulated. And this is what the King's about to try to do this week in Duffer's house with Demis and Sabis. I can't tell you how much it's changed in the last three, four weeks. These same AI leaders who two and a half years ago were calling me a Luddite for calling for a pause and now themselves calling for a pause. But we've got maybe six months, a year, a year and a half before these things are genuine dangers to humanity. And it doesn't feel as though anybody's politics is moving to regulate.

28:20No. And so when we talked about Miliband about, I didn't get into this because I knew we'd just go around in circles, but when he was talking about the use of the word genocide, and he said, well, you've got to leave it to the court. We'll make that decision based upon a court judgment. And the processes now of politics, of technology, they're so fast. So one of the things that struck me from this film, the doctors in Gaza, was they were filming, they often filmed what they were seeing as they went into Gaza. So a few years ago, it looked quite a nice place to live and there were buildings and and there were beaches.

28:59And then step by step, very, very quickly, they're suddenly going in, everything is rubble. Okay? So meanwhile, we're all waiting for a judgment as to whether that word should be applied in our political system. And likewise with this, you say, I heard somebody on the radio yesterday saying, you know, we've got a very short window to decide whether and how to regulate and whether we have the capacity safely to regulate this thing. And yet the political process, as you say, it goes so slowly. And you then have Trump who basically says, well, he's the guy to regulate because he's a high IQ president.

29:39One thing we know about Donald Trump, he may have a weird sort of EQ, but he's not the most intelligent man who's ever been in the White House. And meanwhile, these people who are very brilliant in their own way, you know, you read the book about Demis Hibis, and this guy's brilliant. The guys you talk to if you're serious, they're brilliant at what they do. But I don't think they're brilliant at thinking through effects on humanity. I don't think they're brilliant at working out how a democratic process works alongside these things.

30:12Rory Stewart:And we also don't know how to do the regulation and how to verify. So with the regulation, there's basically a question of whether you try to do a very subtle, exquisite form of let's define what RSI is, or do you say, pause. RSI is this recursive. Yeah, recursive self-improvement, right, sorry. Are you trying to get into a very detailed discussion about policing exactly this jagged frontier? It used to be a repetitive strain injury, didn't it? Is that gone? It's gone, all gone. Nobody talks about that anymore. It's that old men like you who play tennis. I've played tennis. The next thing that we need to talk about might be much more blunt, right?

30:46Rory Stewart:So we might instead be saying, no, you cannot train the next generation of frontier model. We're stopping. ChatGBT7 is not happening. But if you do that, how do you verify they're not doing it? And if you were to get China to sign up to that, how on earth do you verify that China's not doing it? Exactly. I would say at the moment, you could almost do it because it requires so much compute, so many data centers, so much chips, you could almost see from space. Pretty difficult to run a covert program of training a huge billion dollar run of a next generation large language model. But so many of the things we've done over the last year and a half turn out not to have been properly designed.

31:27Rory Stewart:One of them is that we thought that what we were doing in the UK is building a safety institute to train before release. It now turns out most dangerous models aren't released at the moment. They're within these companies and they could end up causing complete chaos for the world without ever getting anywhere near a safety institute because they're not on their way to being released. Right. Happy days. Well, listen, just before we go to the break, I'm now trying to do a mini series to grapple with exactly these issues. I've called it Thinking the Unthinkable, How Civilizations Collapse, but it's basically a series on existential threats.

31:57Rory Stewart:It's the things that we don't normally talk about in domestic politics that are probably not the things that Andy Burnham will be thinking about day to day. They're exactly things like what happens when a terrorist group gets going in Yemen. In fact, we've actually done some detailed interviews which I thought were wonderful with the man who wrote Mosul I, who was sitting in Mosul as the Islamic State took over. We've talked to the amazing Anand Gopal about what was happening up in Manbij up in North East Syria. We've also talked to Carlo Rovelli, the amazing physicist about nuclear weapons. He's reminding us that actually the nuclear proliferation threat is probably greater than it's ever been, and yet we talk about it less.

32:38Rory Stewart:I've talked to Yuval Noah Harari, that's going to be the first episode, about AI and the kind of threats that pose to our civilization. So it's an attempt to try to lift our heads a bit and think, what could be actually the things which in 50 years' time we think, whoa, that was the real issue that defined an age while we're still focused on the stuff that really is retail domestic politics. The first half of my interview with Yuval Noah Harari is free to listen. But if you want to hear the whole series, please sign up, become a member at the rest is politics.com. And I think we've got a taste of the series now just before we go for the break.

33:16Rory Stewart:What if I told you that there is a one in six chance of human beings being wiped out in the next hundred years? One in six. We're facing a crunch point in human history. A handful of threats could end life as we know it. It might be nuclear war. There is high risk in a confrontation between Europe and Russia or between United States and China. There will be no food, ears without sunshine, but the catastrophe will be global. Or artificial intelligence. At the highest level, there are risks of AI takeover. Even Hitler had to sleep because he was an organic entity. AI doesn't sleep. This is the moment that we completely lose control.

33:53Rory Stewart:It could be engineered pandemics. If every five days I infect 10 and then 10 infect 10, it would take about 39 days to get to 70 million people, which is about the population of Britain. The jump from 70 million to 8 billion is just another 10 days. Or is the greatest threat we face actually less tangible? Could it be economic warfare or the collapse of our political systems? You know, the choke point of all choke points in the global economy is the U.S. dollar. All it takes is Donald Trump taking out his Sharpie in the Oval Office and signing a document, and that's it. You could send another country into a recession if you wanted to.

34:28Rory Stewart:Or perhaps are we the real existential threat, the strange ways in which humans convince themselves to do very, very awful things. The question is very simple. How do we continue to live together? To hear my new series on Thinking the Unthinkable, sign up at therestospolitics.com. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks.

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36:55Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're going to talk about finances and politics and reform. So Nigel Farage, damaged in my view, not as much as he should have been, but damaged politically by this£5 million donation from Christopher Harbourn, the Thai-based tech billionaire as was, apparently now back in the UK. And that was£5 million personal, and then I think over£10 million to the party from Christopher Harbourn. And the£5 million, of course, was no strings attached, don't want anything for it, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can spend it on a Ferrari.

37:26You can spend it on whatever you want, some security, keeping me safe for the rest of my life, etc., etc. When I'm not taking security assistance from Posh George. Correct. So there's that one. And then we had this extraordinary undercover film by Verbatim, which Channel 4 showed part of, which you've now watched 3 ,418 times.

37:45Rory Stewart:And you and I had the privilege of speaking to the undercover reporter. You were impressed, weren't you? I thought it was great. I thought it was extreme, but I'm still stuck with this problem, which is I think that it's only when you see the gin and tonics and the showing off - The oysters. I want six, not four. The man of the people, Nigel. And the sense that there's a lot more footage to come. I just feel people need to really absorb themselves and they're there to actually get what the culture of this party is. Well, I said that in relation to the Hooties, you know, this extraordinary development where they take the Red Sea coast and then it's kind of gone in a day in terms of the news.

38:26And likewise, look, this film made a big impact. It obviously sort of, you know, disrupted the reform conference in Birmingham, but it's kind of gone away again. And sufficient for them to be able to come out and literally wipe out the news agenda with these two promises of two donations from two individuals, both crypto people, Bendelo and Christopher Harbourn, 36 million. Now, I've each, 72 million.

38:51Rory Stewart:I mean, you could buy a pretty decent center forward for that. And is the irony of it that one of them's been living in Thailand, the other one's living in Hong Kong? So to some extent, this is money that they have because they didn't have to pay full UK tax. and of course the law. I mean, I do think Labour's been a bit asleep at the wheel on this one. The part of the art of politics and government is seeing what's coming down the track. The Americanisation, the Trumpification of our politics, that is what reform are doing. They're doing it with post-truth, they're doing it with polarisation, and they're doing it with money.

39:26I mean, there was a time, and look, we shouldn't be too pious about this. I can remember when Matthew Harding, who was a Chelsea director, very sadly got killed in a helicopter crash coming back from a match but i think he was our first million pound donor and i remember seeing that as you know this would be amazing because it'd be like you know business will realize that yeah labor's the party of business and that was a million pounds and people thought that is an enormous sum of money on one day yeah they got two people pledging 36 million and the and and labor they have got this legislation going through So there's this debate about whether this kind of thing, because they said it depends on, you know, where you were living at a specific time.

40:06These guys claim that they've moved back to the UK. I don't know. Take them at face value, I guess. But I'll tell you what I find utterly extraordinary is somebody like Farage, who polls say, I think polls, you can take them or leave them, but he is currently viewed as the sleaziest politician in Britain. Okay. If you give people a list of politicians and you count them on a sleaze factor, he's seen as the sleaziest. He's the guy who stands up there and says, these guys are promising this 72 million pounds because they're patriotic British people, patriotic British people who until recently lived in Hong Kong and Thailand and who want nothing from this and who will never be given a peerage.

40:47Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, enough people buy it because enough people will want to think, yeah, that's great. They can really kick the other parties and we don't like them.

40:57Rory Stewart:One of the sad things is that the parties are being, as usual, so short-sighted and self-interested. I talked to someone who'd been interviewing a Labour cabinet minister, asked them whether they would take the money, and their only response was, well, of course, we would do proper checks on whether they're eligible donors. Bullshit to that. Nobody should be taking£36 million from an individual donor. Nobody should be taking£1 million from an individual donor. Nobody should be taking£100 ,000 from an individual donor. It's totally inequitable, unjust, unfair. But the only alternative is state funding.

41:35Rory Stewart:We should have a system. Well, I've actually been doing a little bit of research here. Oh. Bit of research here. Right, here we go. So France, the cap is€7 ,500 per individual. and they have to be French national and fiscally resident in France. Even when they are, 7 ,500. Spain, 50 ,000 euros. Netherlands, 100 ,000 euros. Now, I don't know whether the cap is going to be 50 ,000, 7 ,500. It's not a million. It's 100 ,000. Great. Let's make it 100 ,000. Let's accept that the reason why we're doing that is we're trying to say that you shouldn't be in position where citizens have an undue influence and where parties are built on this dependency.

42:19Rory Stewart:I mean, it's a fundamental principle of equal citizenship without pushing too hard on this, right? Citizens should have roughly equal ability to influence, and the big influence should be from your voters. The problem with this stuff is that you don't really need to listen to your voters if you're getting 72 million in. So the electoral commission has done some modeling, my final figures. On the 319 million pounds, which the party's got over a five-year period, the 100 ,000 pound cap, which is the Alastair Campbell proposal, would have reduced the amount by 57%. The 10 ,000 pound cap, which is the Rory Stewart proposal, would have reduced by 86 % the amount of funding.

42:55Rory Stewart:Now, that tells you a hell of a lot. It tells you that 14 % of people are giving under 10 ,000. Sorry, 14 % of the money is people giving under 10 ,000. 86 % of the money funding all these parties is giving from people who can afford to give over 10 ,000 pounds. Or organisations. Because the argument that the Tories tend to make when Labour has talked about this is that, well, the trade unions are massive donors. Now, it's true the trade unions are. I was talking to Michael Levy the other day, who famously was a Labour Party fundraiser under Tony Blair. And he was saying, he always sort of tried to persuade the unions that there ought to be a way of saying that this is like, you know, 5.3 pence per member.

43:39Or, you know, you could, because that's what the unions are. They represent their members. But this is of a scale. This is what I mean about the Americanization. I mean, 36 million to the Americans is not that much. But do we really want to go down this road? And let me tell you, having run a few election campaigns.

43:55Rory Stewart:As far as I can see still, all this debate in the House of Commons is going on about permissible donors, whether you're living abroad or being taxable. Even in the US, individuals are capped at$3 ,500 per head. Now, there's this horrible Citizens United way around the side. But the reason why the US caps and France caps and Netherlands caps and Spain caps is the same. Why is Britain not capping donations? And what those rules are all about is the principle that however well-intentioned people might be, there is always a risk that people are buying access, influence, etc. And I've got to tell you about this guy Harbourn.

44:34And it's really strange, actually, because one of Fiona and my closest friends is weirdly a really old friend of his. I'm not going to drop them in it. And says, actually, he's quite a nice bloke. So he's given all this money. He gave a million pounds to the office of Boris Johnson Limited, okay, which was one of the biggest donations ever made to an individual politician. Now, January 2023, he got an 80 million pound Ministry of Defence contract, okay, for Kinetic, one of his companies. He went as an advisor to Boris Johnson. I don't know, I mean, I know he's an expert on Thailand. Is he an expert on Ukraine?

45:12Because he went as an advisor to Boris Johnson on his trip to Kiev in September 2023. There may be nothing wrong with this at all. Okay. And I don't know this Bendello guy.

45:23Rory Stewart:I can tell you a little bit about both these people because I know people who know both of them. And the weird thing about it is that they're quite different. Christopher Harbourn seems to be a central casting, Oxbridge-educated, quite fluent guy who, if you read the article he's written in The Sunday Telegraph, is deciding to present himself to the world as David Cameron. Basically, the article is, I care about climate change, I care about funding public services properly, If he cares about climate change, why is he funding a party that thinks that climate change is a hoax? Christopher Harbourn is literally presenting himself in the papers as the last socially liberal, fiscally conservative person in Britain.

46:08Rory Stewart:He literally has written an article that could have been written by David Gawke. Do you think he's confused Nigel Karajal with David Cameron? It's really weird. He's written an whole article that says, I want more pro-business, but I also want well-funded public services. I really care about climate change. He's decided to fund reform. Bendelo is different. Bendelo is somebody who openly would describe himself as being maybe slightly more, I don't know what the correct way to frame it is. Right wing? No, I think it's more that he had struggled at school. He was expelled from schools. He's a math genius.

46:40Rory Stewart:I mean, he's a guy who - Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent math genius. But neither of them seems to be particularly obsessed with culture war stuff. Neither of them is particularly personally lavish. The problem though is that I want to move the argument onto not so much who these guys are as a principle that no party should ever be doing this. You make this point about there could be conflicts of interest, there could be policy things. It's more fundamental. They will represent for reform 95 % of all the money that reform has. Reform will put out 300 constituency managers, all their office space, all their rent.

47:27Rory Stewart:They could buy virtually every billboard in the country. But also, if these guys turn around and say to Reform in a year's time, I don't really like what you're doing there, I'll take my support out. The whole thing collapses like a pack of cards. Or if there is a Reform government, I don't think there will be, but let's say there were, and you've got the first budget coming up, Are you seriously telling me, Nigel, Richard, Zia, Robert, et cetera, that when you get a phone call from Christopher Harbourn, who's given you 36 million and got help to put you in there, that you're not going to take that call ahead of CBI, ahead of some guy who's worked in this industry their whole life?

48:05And I think, again, back to our point about people not understanding AI. Crypto. We don't know the half of what crypto. Remember, Trump said that this whole thing basically was a scam for organized crime. Well, I've never seen that much to say that it's not. So, and by the way, I'm not saying Mr. Dello and Mr. Harbourn are involved in organized crime, but Mr. Dello, you know, I think anybody who has a Trump pardon on their record for offences related to money laundering should not be a permissible donor in the United Kingdom. I'm sorry. Yes, you can have a pardon, but we know there's a lobbying, there's a program on 60 Minutes this week, which we should advertise widely, where they've exposed these lawyers who are basically saying for$300 ,000, I can get you a pardon.

48:50So - And let me tell you the other thing about it. Tell me about it. Look, you went to a public school, right? And this is my theory about Dello. Because as you say, he's a maths geek. Yeah. Okay. And apparently he's an amazing...

49:02Rory Stewart:From a relatively modest background. Yeah. And he's an amazing maths geek. And was picked up by an amazing tutor at Worcester College, Oxford, who spotted his talent for automation. And he's now given a massive donation to them as well. So he's obviously made a lot of money. But don't you get the feeling that maybe Nigel Farage and Richard Tice are like the sort of school bullies who've picked on the neurodivergent maths geek? And this is his way of kind of getting in with him a bit. I don't know. I don't know. That's how it feels to me. Who would want to hang out with Farage? And Tice, exactly.

49:35Rory Stewart:But maybe he does. There is a weird... Ben, you can come on the podcast and review all this. A weird little circle around this guy, Dukes, who was part of the scandal. It's one of this coterie of young men who seem to adore Farage and be with him all the time and following around all the time and think he's incredibly funny and charismatic. To come back to beating my big drum, if one had a cap on donations, actually one wouldn't need to get into the micro details so much of whether somebody who's been pardoned in the US or fiscating. If you capped at£10 ,000, none of these people could have disproportionate influence.

50:15Rory Stewart:The great thing, because I did this when I was running to be the leadership, right? What I realized is if you cap at£10 ,000, any politician really can tell someone to F off. Okay, you take your£10 ,000, well, another£10 ,000, right? Even nicer would be though, if we followed Peter Malinowskis, your hero who you introduced us to, I think is extraordinary. He's designed a whole system of public funding in Australia, which has tried to balance the fact. He says it's got to be fair, rational, reflective of community support, and not impossible for new entrants. And it's a lovely set of things. Here's another idea that I have.

50:51Rory Stewart:You can match small donations. So let's say the government - With the state? Yeah. Let's say the government said for every pound you give up to 250 pounds will triple it. For all parties? Any citizen that gives a pound up to 250 pounds, the government will triple it. Above 250 pounds, nothing. Give much more weight to the small donor and much less to the big donor. I mean, right now, arguing is very hard to argue for state funding with all the other pressures on the public verse, isn't it? All right. Well, then let's just stop the value funding. What do they need the money for anyway? What are they doing with the stupid money?

51:23They're doing a lot of things. I mean, my big worry about 72 million, and having been involved, that is a lot of money to buy a lot of advertising. And they won't care about whether they're on the edge of the law during a campaign. I'm sorry, they won't.

51:36Rory Stewart:Well, they're all these parties. So let's follow my figures. £10 ,000 cap, reduced by 86%, come down from 319 million down to whatever, I don't know, 60 million. Fine. Parties can do what they like with 60 million. Give us less advertising. Okay. Get out there, do a bit of old-fashioned leafleting. Yeah, I get rid of that. Knock on a few doors. They'll hire a few doors. There are very well-paid agents in every single constituency. Well, they shouldn't be allowed to, nor should Labor, nor should the Conservatives, nor should Lib Dems. They get free television anyway. It's not like the states we have to pay for television.

52:08Rory Stewart:They get free television during the campaign. What do they need the money for, these buggers? Yeah, okay. So Labor, Labor, Labor shows some principles. That's why I think it worries me a little bit about this government. You want more principle? I want Andy Burnham to come out and say, not, oh, I found a way to shaft reform, but actually this is a wake-up call for all of us. None of us are going to take a donation over Alistair Campbell's£100 ,000 limit. There was a point, you know, maybe this proves your point. There was a point where I was utterly stunned to be named as Labour's biggest doler.

52:41It was actually when Ed was leader, because I can't remember how much it was, but it was about£10 ,000. And because at the time, nobody was funding the parties. And now Labour will be thinking, well, we've got to find ways to compete with this, I'm afraid. because, you know, this stuff does work. It's why the Americans have got this arms race. And it's why you're right about the principle. It's why we've got to stop it. Just on the, on the...

53:05Rory Stewart:Dear public, France capped at 7 ,500. Spain capped at 50 ,000. Netherlands capped at 100 ,000. Why is Britain not capping? I think Rory should write a piece about a party for the newsletter. There you are, I'll show you up. Just to shout, Louis Wilson, though, who was the undercover reporter. And where I agree with Rory, he said last week, you've got to see the whole thing. But the other thing is really, really interesting. And we made a proposition to Louis Wilson because they've got tons more. Tons. So much more. And I don't know about you. I think Richard Tyson, you should wind your neck in for a bit.

53:40That's all I'm saying. They've got tons more of James Orr. He said they had six of those long meetings where he rambled on about himself endlessly. So they've got tons and tons more.

53:51Rory Stewart:I'm talking instantly apparently on being on Ben Dello's yacht when actually quite a lot of the pitch in the Sunday Telegraph is Ben Dello doesn't like yachts. Yeah, there you go. There's a lot in there. So the point is, Channel 4, you had a big hit with this. Do another programme. Do another one. There's lots in there. And what we said to Louis, if all of our broadcasters lack the spine to take this on, then I think we would happily. We could even have a James All Minute every day, every week for a year. Absolutely honoured to. Now, just as we finish, Alistair, I'm looking forward very much to interviewing you on your new book, Percivalience.

54:29Rory Stewart:So you're going to tell us a little bit about it. Well, what I'm going to know, I'll do that in the interview. What I am going to do is to announce the winner. Okay. Can you believe this, how clever our listeners are, Rory? So I said last week, guess the title of the book. Several thousand took part, said it was one word. Yeah. 503 guessed correctly. 503 guests plus villains? Yeah. 104 thought it was Maradona. No, the funniest one, one person thought it was Woot Burger, which was that German word that you were so impressed by. So the winner, the guy who was first to guess it's called Graham Flint, he's going to get a whole bundle of prizes.

55:06He's going to get a sign book obvs. He's going to get a mention in the paperback. We're going to allow him a question on question time. And he's going to get free tickets to the launch event, which will be an act of profound pedultery, Rory. You've had yours. I'm having mine. It's an event for the new world. It's me interviewed by Michelle Hussein. Stop shaking, Adam. It's me interviewed by Michelle Hussein, or as we call in our house, the BBC's loss is Bloomberg's gain at the Cadogan Hall in London, October 22nd. And yeah, I think we'll probably give a few free tickets out to newsletter people as well, because we love the newsletter.

55:40RestlessPolice.com forward slash newsletter. And to those, by the way, who don't like our plugging, well, it's our podcast.

55:47Rory Stewart:Just to finish, let's bring it all together. Let's wrap it all together. What I was thinking about this morning is that these themes, what's happened in Yemen, the closing of the Red Sea, AI reform funding, is all part of a bigger story that we've been talking about in this podcast for nearly four years, which is the collapse of the old rules, splintering of political parties, populism, global conflict. Where we now need to move on to is how we redesign the world to cope with it, or more bluntly, what do we do about it? Because the evidence is now all around us. And the problem is that unless people start carnying their way around and coming up with a structure and a solution or following Malinowskis domestically and carny internationally, right?

56:37Rory Stewart:And I quite like that. Maybe you should do a book on Malinowskis, domestic, Carney International. We're going to find it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. People are really kidding themselves if they think it's okay, as the Foreign Office, I fear, sometimes seems to be saying, let's put our head in the sands, hope America's going to be our friends again in two years' time. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally every time we open the papers and we read, 72 million pounds has gone into reform. For goodness sake, the Red Sea has been closed by the Houthi terrorist group. The US president is calling for a united Ireland.

57:10Rory Stewart:AI potentially has agents that could wipe out humanity and nobody's prepared to regulate this. Stuff which would have defined an entire generation are now happening every day. That's the point you made at the Festival Hall, it's true. It's why it gets so, so annoying when people say, oh, politics, nothing ever changes anyway. I mean, hadn't there ever been a time where things have changed so fast, so much, and politics has got to catch up with it. Processors have got to catch up with it. Morality, solutions, communication. Morality, solutions, communication. MSC, Community Security Conference, MSC, Ministry of Master of Science.

57:45Rory Stewart:What we need is exactly this. We need Andy Burnham to have the solution. In case of reform, it could be cap on funding. We're not going to take more than£10 ,000 from any individual. Communication, the charm out there doing the Burnham stuff, but at the back, the morality. What are the values which are driving this? And that value needs to connect from Manchester to Manchuria.

58:10Thank you, Rory. That's absolutely brilliant. We should also say, I want to just say a little thing about Andy Bernal because he did the Great North Run and his dad died. Oh. That is so sad. I think having these normal public events that we all have to deal with, having them when you're really, really high profile public figure, I think it's very, very hard. so thoughts with Andy and his family

58:33Rory Stewart:thoughts with Andy and his family very good alright see you soon bye bye

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