576. How Xi is Outplaying Trump and Tensions in Northern Ireland

29:17And one of the key issues for leaders of large corporates and institutions the world over is this. How do you act when certainty never arrives? Well, the best leaders don't wait for that certainty. Instead, they build confidence through insight, expertise, and trusted relationships. Whether it's through summits or their insights hub, Lloyd's helps their clients understand the forces shaping global markets. Search Lloyd's Corporate for daily global market analysis, the download on tokenization and how to manage your company's energy transition, all from Lloyd's Corporate and Institutional Banking.

29:52Bank on Lloyd's.

30:01Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Sandbrook here from The Rest is History, and we are here to tell you about a thrilling new series on the blood-soaked climax of the French Revolution, the reign of terror. So the French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history. It essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it, but it is also unbelievably dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder of the firebrand Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. We will be going to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. And in our final episode, we will be telling the story of the extraordinary and grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilien Crobbenspire.

30:54So if you want to hear this epic series, search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Okay, Rory, Nickel in Glasgow. How worried are you by the reignition of tensions and the possibility of full-scale war in Ethiopia and Eritrea? Which regional actors could this drag in around the Horn of Africa and the Gulf? And will the international community continue to stand idly by if another humanitarian crisis emerges? Let's start with the sort of basic facts. So there was an incredible shift.

31:32Ethiopia, which was in many ways the kind of darling of the West, the great developmental state, because it was gone from extreme poverty and had a relatively stable government. You know, this would have been true when Tony Blair was in. This would have been true almost right the way through to me as an Africa minister in 26, 2017, growing at 8 % a year. then collapsed into a very, very nasty civil war. Really attentive listeners will remember that Alistair and I covered the Ethiopian civil war, which was really a fight between people from Tigray in the Highland North, a traditional governing group of Ethiopia for many of the last decades, and the new government of Abiy Ahmed, the federal government, which was resolved by something called the Pretoria Accords, which brought peace at the end of 2022.

32:18Since then, the Tigray group split, hardliners took over, and a new coalition has emerged, an unusual coalition, where some of Abiy Ahmed's key allies, both ethnic groups inside Ethiopia and the Eritreans that he was relying on last time, now seem to have swapped sides in an unstable coalition with Tigray. And now the fighting is breaking out again. And lots of things follow on from that, including are they going to be able to cut off the access to Djibouti, which is Ethiopia's only access to the sea? Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last conflict. Is that going to begin again? And what does this mean for the broader region?

32:55Now, remember that it's coming unstuck at almost the same time as the peace deal in Yemen, which had kept pretty static front lines since 2022 also came unstuck just a few weeks ago with the Houthis storming down the side of the Red Sea. And that raises a whole series of questions, one of them for Ethiopia itself, which is a country which you, I think, recently in the newsletters, there's one of your favorite countries in the world and posted some lovely pictures of yourself in Ethiopia. But it's an enormous place, 160 million odd people. It's the great land-based market for all of the Horn of Africa ports.

33:35But this is also a story, as Nicol implies, which stretches much, much further. Because what's happened is now the Houthi have come all the way down the side of the Red Sea. And you now need to look at both sides of the Red Sea in order to see this whole new unfolding problem, a real geographical problem. Because you've got the states down the Arabian side of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia down into Yemen with the Houthi now controlling one side. And then down the other side, you've got this chain of states which runs down from Egypt through Sudan, I hope I'm not going to miss anything here, Eritrea, Djibouti, what's now been recognized by Israel as Somaliland, and then the Somali province of Portland.

34:16And what's really interesting there is that you've had the United Arab Emirates trying to position itself all the way along that coast with port deals, most of which have begun going horribly wrong. So if we go stage by stage, they backed the RSF in Sudan. And so the Sudanese military has taken control of the port that UAE had there. Djibouti kicked them out. Eritrea has now turned against the Emirates, apparently in favor of Egypt. The Somali government under pressure from Saudi Arabia has now said they don't want any UAE ports. And so they're clinging on to this funny enclave, which is a sort of UAE Israel enclave around independent Somaliland.

34:59And they're facing against them a coalition which feels like a sort of Saudi Egyptian, potentially Turkish Sudanese coalition with Ethiopia, with UAE and everyone else with the other lot. Now, that's a complicated story. But where am I getting to here, where I'm getting to here is this is the collapse of the global order in miniature, and it's the beginning. It's just the beginning. We've seen the Yemen peace deal collapsing a couple of weeks ago. We're seeing the Ethiopian peace deal collapsing. Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the South Sudan relative peace that we've had since 2016 is also a bad collapse that's just on the other border.

35:37And where is America in all this? Where is Europe in all this? Because what you've got is American allies fighting each other. And America completely unable to define what its national interests are, which should be pretty clear, should be an open Red Sea and support nation states, instead of which they are allowing Israel and UAE to essentially encourage failed states, breakaway states, strange groups in order to create this network of alliances and ports. Nickles' question about where is the international community in all this is the right one and you could say well there are so many conflicts going on and nobody can be expected to be across them all and that historically has been the role of the united nations this is you know we talked about this last week the the chief purpose of the united nations has been peace and security okay and what you've just described there is an area where there's been a history of conflict but then there has there have been periods of relative peace and security and one of the reasons for that is that at the right time the international community has found ways of becoming properly engaged and we're now in this world of trump and of china and of putin and we're just we don't have i'd like to think that both andy burnham and emmanuel macron the other two leaders of the the permanent five the united nations do care about this do understand why it matters to all of us, but they alone are not going to be able to drive an international response to it.

37:09And it's, you know, I don't know if I said it was one of my favourite countries in the world. I said it was one of the, I think it's one of the, I saw it as the most beautiful. I think it's a beautiful country. My first experience of it was back covering the famine in the 80s in Ethiopia, and then Eritrea and Tigray. There's a famous photograph of you with the leader of Eritrea that we always have to keep bringing up. No, one, it's not a famous photograph. It's a photograph that you like because it shows me as a young man looking rather fawningly at this handsome freedom fighter. Barilla leader, exactly.

37:44Freedom fighter, as we call him, as we called him at the time, who we thought was going to deliver a peaceful democratic, and he's now become one of the world's longest serving dictators. You can't get every judgment right, Roy, okay? so but but anyway i did find that conflict and that war astonishingly interesting and eritrea is a beautiful is a beautiful part of the world i mean you see horrific you know you see a lot of poverty we at that time saw a lot of violence a lot of death and you had the eplf eritrean people's liberation front and you had the tplf the tigre people's liberation front and of course you talked about Abiy Ahmed's Nobel Prize, that was because of reconciling, coming to peace with Eritrea.

38:30But of course, it didn't take long before he was then fighting a war with Tigray. And of course, Ethiopia is a huge country, but at the same time, it has real difficulties in terms of access to the sea. And that has been a cause of a lot of the sort of difficulties that they've had. But But I just wish we could get back to a place where an issue like this, both in terms of political interest around the world and media interest as well, because without those two things, these things just fall off the agenda and chaos becomes normalized. And that's what I worry is going to happen here. Well, the change is unbelievable, isn't it?

39:08Because from the civil war that you were reporting in the 80s and the rise of the sort of Eritrean Che Guevara as he appeared through to the 90s and 2000s, the 90s and 2000s, we sort of thought, the world sort of thought it had a model, didn't it, for dealing with this? It would have talked about the African Union coming in, the UN, IGAD, which was a coordination structure. We would have been talking about the developmental state. We would have been talking about justice. We would have been thinking about governance reforms. And it looked pretty good for a bit, right? It looked as though the story was sort of working in the 90s and 2000s.

39:47yes, we were worrying about Somali pirates. Yes, we were worrying about terrorism, but we were not at that stage imagining because they didn't really count. Nobody was talking about the Gulf states. I mean, what's really changed? I remember this in Somalia turning up as the African minister in 2016. I sort of feel I was at the beginning of seeing what had happened. I turned up in Somalia where Britain was still talking as though it was the major player or one of the major players in Somalia, because I guess we probably had been very influential probably just a couple of years earlier. By the time I turned up, the Turks were everywhere.

40:24The Emiratis were everywhere. And you could already sense things shifting very, very, very, very quickly. And Britain mattered less and less. The US still mattered, but Britain mattered less. Now, where does that mean that we go now? Well, I think just the brutal numbers are shocking. The Uppsala Institute that manages this now says that we have over 60 live conflicts in the world, which is the most that they've measured in any time since 1945. So before anyone gets the impression that we're just suffering from some global derangement syndrome, and that actually everything's going in the right direction, the statistics suggest this is not an anomaly at all.

41:04This is what happens when the global order begins to fray. Why did you say, you said something very interesting when you were going through it, why did you say that you thought that South Sudan could be the next? What's going on there that I haven't been across? Well, so South Sudan has these very, very deep residual conflicts going on between the Nour and the Dinka, particularly two of the big ethnic groups that play into this, and particularly between two of the leading figures, particularly a guy called Riek Macha. and that seemed a little bit like Yemen and I guess a little bit like Somalia and probably at times a little bit like Ethiopia, a conflict that was almost indefinitely going to continue because it felt like nor known, felt like there were all these deep historical roots and so many people had been killed and it was so savage.

41:55And then oddly, a semi-stalemate emerged, which meant that for some years over the last few years, it's been much, much less bad than the world that we saw in the late teens. And it now feels to me that these things spill very, very quickly across borders. You know, all these players that I'm talking about, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, some cases with Iranian drones or Chinese drones, are now major players in disrupting Libya. They're major players in a lot of these things that we've been talking, these coup d 'etats across the Sahel. So Chad is very much connected with UAE. And if people look at South Sudan on the map, the likelihood of things spilling over again from Sudan or Ethiopia into South Sudan seems to me really strong.

42:51And that's before you get on to insurgency in the DRC. I don't want to be too grumpy about this. And I'm also worried that in trying to predict where the next sort of semi-peace deal settlements collapse, I'm missing other things. I mean, I still remain very concerned about the fact that if I were Iran, I would be trying to sink a ship in Suez. Now that you've closed Hormuz and the Red Sea, closing the next checkpoint. And this is also funny, it's partly a technology point. It's partly a point about the fact that the US has lost, partly because of drones, its real ability to prevent relatively weak states or even insurgency groups doing extraordinary things to each other, to shipping.

43:39And drones keep popping up in all these stories. Yemen, the Tigray front was basically blocked from its advance on our list by drones paid for by UAE and bought from Turkey, Iran and China. I think that's the kind of stuff that will drive into South Sudan. But I also think we may be looking too much at Africa and we may see stuff happening in Asia and Latin America as well. South Sudan's landlocked, isn't it? Like Ethiopia, both landlocked. Yes, absolutely. Alice, a quick question for you, because you've been following this closely. Josh, what do you make of the upcoming elections in Brazil that seem neck and neck between Lula and Flavio, who I think is the son of Bolsonaro, the old populist right-wing leader.

44:20What I make of them is that they are neck and neck. It's a very, very, very foolish man who's going to bet his house on the outcome. I think until recently, I think there was a sense that the Bolsonaro mythology with the dad in jail and lots of difficulties between the son and his step-mom who's also campaigning to be an elected representative as well um i'd love to know how much the americans are uh are getting involved in you know because we've seen the extent to which the americans like to get involved in these latin american elections and the reason why well this matters because brazil is a huge country lula and claudia schaumbam in mexico are really the only two left from the left who are facing up to this sort of right-wing wave and of course Bolsonaro senior uh he's serving a lot very long uh prison sentence for doing something that Donald Trump got away with which is basically trying to resist uh the outcome the democratic outcome of an election that was held his son Flavio is the candidate Flavio but it is clear there was a very very good piece in the ft magazine at the weekend it's clear that the dad is still very very powerful in the whole the whole setup flavio is even on record as saying you know he's not these words but he's i'm basically not fit to tie his shoelaces he's the man kind of thing and of course lula is um i don't know his exact age but he's pretty much in the trump generation he's he's in his he's certainly 80 plus as it were you know you've also got the elections to the chamber of deputies there's a huge election across the weekend.

45:56I think rather than speculate now, probably best if we come back to it next week when we actually know what the outcome will be. And it's probably going to be some sort of runoff, but I wouldn't put my money on Lula holding on. And I think it'd be pretty grim for democracy if a Bolsonaro came back. Worrying. We'll keep an eye on that. And as you say, it's interesting how successful, from Trump's point of view, he must feel that he's being all the way from Venezuela across to Argentina and all these elections, he seems to be getting a sort of full slate of his sort of El Salvador vision of Latin America.

46:31Although, of course, some of my more right-wing Latin American friends would disagree with me and say that we've been too sympathetic towards hopeless left-wing populist leaders across Latin America. That's a bigger conversation. Rory, here's one for you, because I know the answer to this from your perspective, Linda, will you be going to see the Bayer tapestry? I've been invited to a couple of things that I've not been able to do, but I know you have been. So was it worth the visit? Went with Shoshana and children, absolutely worth the visit. I love the British Museum, so I'm not going to hit them too hard on the organisation.

47:04But just spoiler alert, if like us, you go at three in the afternoon, you're waiting a very, very long time because they still haven't sorted out how you move down that tapestry so that you don't end up waiting a long time, even when you've booked your time slot on your tickets. That aside, I mean, the tapestry is incredible. I mean, the first thing which you'd love, I think, Alistair, is it's an amazing exercise in storytelling. Because somebody sitting down not long after the Battle of Hastings was having to work out, how do you tell the story in pictures? It's basically a graphic novel or a cartoon strip of what happened.

47:41And they're having to choose very dramatically, you know, okay, let's start with Edward the Confessor sending off Harold off to Northern France, and then he's getting captured, and then he's fighting with William, and then an oath is given, and then Edward's handing over the throne, and he's crowned, and now the boats are coming across, and now the horses are gathering, and the arches. And that's the first thing. The second thing is, it's actually an amazingly innovative piece of art. I mean, I can't think of any other medieval art before that, which actually tells the story in that way. It's more like Trajan's Column, or maybe if you go to the British Museum, more like the Elgin Marbles or something, and the way that it gets the frieze going all the way along rather than the sort of blocky stories that you'd expect in a medieval manuscript.

48:27So really exciting. And I think such a great decision to bring it over because so few people were seeing it in Bayer. And it means so much to us. And I think means maybe even more to us in an age where we love graphic novels and cartoons to see. And also, Alistair, I promise you, you will be able to read all the Latin all the way across, even just on the basis of your French. It's a wonderfully simple medieval Latin. So do you think we should keep it? Like we kept the elegant marble, should we do that? Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. What are they going to do? What are they going to do? are they going to come and get it hey yeah honestly what are they going to do well yeah sounds good how long did it take you to get around i mean you said until we complained isn't george osborne the head of the british museum we should we should complain to him about the organization he is and tom holland our great co-presenter in rest history is a trustee and doubtless they will accuse me for being bitter that i'm not the chair or the trustees but i do think here's an idea for the british museum if you're listening If you're not prepared to put a moving staircase, which is what they have at the Tower of London to keep people moving through the crown jewels, a simple thing you could do is you could just have a rope with knots in it and everyone has to cling on to their bit of the rope.

49:40And then everyone would move in time because actually the problem is the gaps that emerge between people. Can you take pictures? No, they won't let you take pictures anymore because that's one of the things they're blaming on the queues. So they've stopped pictures and videos. But the solution… But you could take pictures before. There's not a sort of reason why you can't photograph. No, no, you could before. It's just that as they're becoming more and more panicked by people like me grumbling about the fact that they're waiting an hour and a quarter beyond their time and missing their kid's birthday party, which is what happened with me and I.

50:10They're trying to work out what it is. I have a solution. An old-fashioned rope with knots in it cling onto the rope, and then everybody would move together shoulder to shoulder at the same speed. Okay, right. Okay, so this is very much an Alistair question. Jürgen Klopp recently spoke about reclaiming the flag for ordinary Germans through what he calls positive patriotism, arguing that national pride should not be left to political extremes. Do you think public figures, particularly in sport, can successfully separate patriotism from nationalism, or is reclaiming national symbols from political movements much harder?

50:47That's an ideal Alistair question, isn't it? That's positive sense of national pride and football altogether. Gunn, over to you. Well, it's got football. It's got one of the most charismatic public figures on the planet who happens to be German, but who's well known in England because he was manager of Liverpool, where I am now. And it's also got a really good opportunity to, you know, to lay into the populist far right. So Jürgen Klopp, this is really interesting. He's become the manager of Germany, Germany, which has been struggling football wise. and he turned up for his inaugural press conference as a manager because he always wears a baseball cap and a new baseball cap and it basically was a sort of modern version of the flag and the slogan was one of 80 million something like that and he sort of said i'm not going to get political i'm not going to be political but he basically without mentioning the alternative for deutschland he kind of said he was sick and tired of the flag being you know taken by the extremes and he said the one thing that football can do is actually that, you know, we can all unite behind the flag as the symbol of our country.

51:53I also saw a really interesting interview with him this week. I had no idea about this. He was asked why he always seemed to be so positive. And he said, because he had eine fantastische Familie. Can you get that one right? We can translate that. Yeah, that's a bit like the Latin on the Bayer tapestry. We can get that. Okay, so you've got eine fantastische Familie. Und auch ich bin ein gläubiger Christus. Is he Christian? I'm a believer in Christ, yeah, which I had no idea. So he said they were the twin things that drove him. Anyway, that's nothing to do with patriotism. But I thought that was very interesting.

52:24Anyway, answer to your question, Matt, yes, is the answer. Because this is something that the extremes often do, mainly the extremes of the right rather than the left, but they seize, they try to pretend that they alone represent the patriotic voice. And I would argue at the moment that there's a case to be made for attacking the far right, not least in our country, where we now have the reform who call the RNLI, note the word Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a migrant taxi service who regularly attack the police. who on the back of the recent arrests at Fairford, as ever, just used it to try to sort of, you know, make this somehow about immigration.

53:11So I just think that there is a positive patriotism, which is you love your country, but you want your country to be better. And there is a negative patriotism to me, which is a divisive patriotism. This is that only if you follow my sort of politics, Farage, Rupert Lowe, et cetera, then only then can you truly be a patriot. So I thought what Klopp did in Germany was good. And of course, Germany's got the same sort of political problems we have at the moment. Well, it's lovely, but he's basically just copied Gareth Southgate. Yeah, good point. Good point. Gareth Southgate did do something very similar.

53:44Another opportunity to plug James Graham's latest play. We loved Gareth Southgate. Can you get Klopp on the show, please? We'll definitely give it a go. It doesn't do many sort of... Have I seen many podcasts he's done? I'd love to know where he said the thing about Christ. um yeah we can try and get jrgen klopp he's a very very very he's a very very fine man i've also got a very funny story about club i i um i share his vet well i want to say i share his vet i have your miniature king charles spaniel goes to the same vet that jrgen klopp's dog went to did once did once because of the ludicrousness of brexit our poor dog although she doesn't know it she has now we we've got so many passport stamps for our dog every time you take your dog to europe you have to go and see a vet before you bring it back okay and so fiona and i were in salt in northern germany and we took it to the vet and on the on the front was a on the reception desk was a book and the book was a written by the vet and the vet whatever the vet's claims to fe was that Jorgen Klopp took his dog there when it swallowed a jellyfish oh that's a really good story I like that very much so there you are swallowed so jellyfish yeah I like that anyway the dog was saved and it's all fine and Jorgen's happy I hope the dog's still happy and we yeah so there we are I share Jorgen's vet that's lovely lovely thing to lovely thing to end on um well Alistair thank you very much and look forward to talking again next week see you soon bye Hi, it's Rory here.

55:21I've been thinking a lot about the big existential questions that we often don't want to address, the things that don't feel immediate, but which could actually change our entire world. And I was joined today by Yuval Noah Harari to discuss what he calls AI imperialism, kill switches, how alien intelligence could soon create a world that we cannot and can never begin to understand. Have a listen. I think we are entering a new age of imperialism, which is radically different from every previous age of imperialism in history. Because in every previous age, there was a certain inevitable limit to how much power you can concentrate in one place.

56:10If you look at the Roman Empire, So the Roman Empire economically, even if it conquers the whole Mediterranean, it cannot move like the main source of economic wealth is ultimately agriculture and wheat fields. It cannot physically move the wheat fields from Egypt to Italy. And so a lot of power remains in the provinces. If you look at the British Empire, it cannot move the oil fields from Iraq to Yorkshire. It's impossible. So a lot of the power remains in the provinces. With AI, you can move all the assets, which are ultimately just code, to the imperial hub, with really nothing remaining in the provinces.

56:52Similarly, if you think about it in military terms, the Roman Empire, if you're a Roman merchant and you sell the latest model of bows to some picts beyond Adrian Wall, they can then use it against you. There is no button in Rome that you press the button and all these bows stop working. In the 19th century, if some British merchant sells sold rifles to Afghan tribesmen, they can then use it to do things the British don't like, like kill British soldiers. Victoria doesn't have a magic button that if she presses the button, all these rifles stop working. With AI, this is the case that if you buy your AI drone swarm from the Americans, there is a button in Washington that when they press, it stops working.

57:42And this means when you have this kind of kill switch, of course, in the extreme case, they press it. But long before they press it, they use the existence of the kill switch to extort and exert their power. Your knowledge that they have the kill switch already means that you have to cooperate. Let's just dig into the economics. So imagine I'm running a medical insurance company in Yorkshire, employing lots of people in small towns. And they're working, I don't know, 4 ,000 of them are call center people, 1 ,000 of them are software engineers. And an American company, Anthropic or OpenAI, develops a new program which replaces all my call center people because suddenly the AI can take the calls and speak very beautifully and replaces all my software coders because now actually the clawed code can do all the work that these people can do in an instant.

58:40Now the medical insurance business in this place is being served from the United States with their products. And now all these people have lost their jobs, 5 ,000 call center workers, 1 ,000 software engineers. Now the government is no longer receiving, the British government is no longer receiving income tax from these individuals because they don't have an income. In fact, the British government now needs to pay unemployment, welfare benefit to these people. But it's not even able to tax the corporation. The corporation is now in the United States. So the revenue base of the British government collapses.

59:17The economic growth is removed. The productivity benefit goes off the United States. And there is a huge sucking sound like a vacuum cleaner sucking the wealth of Britain over to the United States. Yes, exactly. So I just wanted to see if we can develop this a little bit as one of the risks before we get on to killer drones of what it could actually mean for economies like the British or European economy if we end up in a world in which the very latest frontier models are located uniquely in the United States and China, and they choose to use those to run the companies themselves rather than allow us to build off the back of them.

59:58What is, I mean, what you get, again, it's an extreme imperial economy where the only thing that remains in the provinces are certain raw materials that are still needed and cannot be moved physically. So it's oil, it's rare earth minerals and things like that. Yep. Everything which is based on humans, like human intelligence, this can be done from the hub with AIs. And there's something else which is also true of the imperial economy, which I didn't understand until I was the African minister. One is tempted to say, and we also have a market, but as we get poorer, our market matters less and less.

1:00:33I remember talking to a businessman about trying to encourage him to invest in Africa. And he said, I'm not investing in sub-Saharan Africa because the entire middle class of sub-Saharan Africa is smaller than the population of Belgium. And he defined middle class as having an income of more than$800 a month. So one of the interesting things is that if your economy collapses, you don't actually have the leverage of saying, you need our market. Yep, absolutely. And we don't have any precedent for such an economic scenario from history, which is why it's so difficult, and going back to the issue of thinking the unthinkable, to really come to terms with it.

1:01:13But I think this should be the number one or number two worry of all the countries in the world except for the two leading ones, the USA and China, which will benefit from this new kind of economics. Okay, here was a story given to me by somebody in Afghanistan. So somebody in Afghanistan said, we don't really need to worry. We're barely connected to the internet. We don't really have very much electricity between Herat and Kabul. We are living a subsistence life as peasant farmers. The United States already tried for 20 years to spend$2 trillion dollars with all the latest technology in the world to try to conquer us, and they gave up and left, we'll be fine.

1:01:55Our life won't change very much. It is true that villagers in Afghanistan, in this sense, are in a much better situation than lawyers in London, whose life, the life that they know, could be completely destroyed. And the villager in Afghanistan, his life is not necessarily completely destroyed. No, not in the short term. In the long run, the danger of a planet dominated by AI is not that the AI will try to unsuccessfully build democracy in Afghanistan, wasting$2 trillion and creating so much havoc. the AIs will just not care about the humans. They can go on living, whatever they are doing, until the moment that the AIs need something from that particular place.

1:02:45And then they just don't care what is the impact on the humans living there. The thing is, we cannot really imagine the scenarios. If we can imagine them, they are not realistic. As a less intelligent entity, we cannot imagine the concerns, the ambitions, the plans of the more intelligent entities. Like if you live in, I don't know, in some jungle, you're a monkey. And some oil company is coming and destroys your forest to drill for oil. And you cannot imagine what is driving this process. Like you say, are they coming to get my bananas? And no, no, no, they are not coming to get your bananas.

1:03:25It's just that the price of oil is now 150 because of a war in the Middle East. And therefore, it makes sense for them to destroy your forest. And you cannot understand it. Well, because, I mean, it's particularly strange in that example, because the monkey has to understand that what they're really interested in is trees and organic matter that rotted 100 million years ago, rather than the trees that are actually standing here. because somehow they're able to set the stuff on fire and generate energy from it to do something. Which they use in order to watch funny cat videos on their smartphones.

1:03:58Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was from part two of my conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Sign up at the RestlessPolitics.com to hear the whole interview, as well as so much more member content. That's the RestlessPolitics.com.

1:04:21We are getting a statement from number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board. The great game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess our Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. He took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. The man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

1:05:02We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A fragger that says to kill the president of Russia. Yes. New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff. Duffy. An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two times friendly key. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe.

1:05:44Don't do it, nothing! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.