Russian spy ship, secret Ukraine peace deal, AI nightmare for novelists - Cheat Sheet with Ridge & Frost

0:00Wilfred Frost:How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Hello, you are listening to Cheat Sheet, the podcast that gets you up to speed with everything that's happening in just 10 minutes. I'm Sophie.

0:38Sophy Ridge:And I'm Wilf. It's Thursday, the 20th of November. Here's what's happening.

0:42Wilfred Frost:So the UK is exploring military options. If a Russian spy ship sails any closer to British shores, we're going to explain what's happened in the last 24 hours.

0:51Sophy Ridge:Meanwhile, the US and Russia could be secretly forming a plan to end the war in Ukraine.

0:58Wilfred Frost:and it is a nightmare to be honest for novelists. Nearly half of authors in the UK think they're going to be replaced by AI.

1:09Wilfred Frost:Right, let's talk about the Russian ship off the coast of Scotland. The Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says the government's deployed a Royal Navy warship and also RAF planes to keep an eye on what it's up to. It was spotted yesterday. what they suspected of doing is gathering intelligence to try and map Britain's undersea cables. The ship known as the Yantar is just off the north coast of Scotland at the minute and it was also seen pointing lasers at pilots of RAF aircraft. Let's listen to what the Defence Secretary had to say. He said the UK is exploring military options if it gets any closer to British shores.

1:48Wilfred Frost:And he did a press conference yesterday as the news broke and addressed the Kremlin directly. My message to Russia and to Putin is this. We see you. We know what you're doing. And if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready.

2:04Sophy Ridge:We are ready. It's pretty serious stuff. It's just on the edge of our territorial waters, but is in our economic waters. And I think that what jumps out most of all the defence secretary was saying is the laser that was used is a military grade laser, which is aiming to distract the pilots. It's not some child with a laser and something like that. And that's clearly very serious. As our security analyst, Michael Clarke, who I always look to things like this, says, you know, this is very serious. We're right to be worried. As you said, we're ready, is the rhetoric. It came after yesterday, we talked about this report from the House of Commons that said, we're not ready.

2:44Sophy Ridge:So I do think we're starting to see how real the threats are and how essentially urgent it is that this extra spending is spent well and efficiently on the type of threats we face today, which are changing, and that we do that with urgency.

3:00Wilfred Frost:The difficulty is, John Healy says we're ready, but what are they actually going to do? Because any attack on this warship will be seen as a massive escalation with Russia, which I would imagine is not what they want to do. And if you look at what Russia is saying, They've denied spying. They've accused the British government of what they're describing as an escalation of militaristic hysteria and saying that actually there's nothing to see here. It's just, you know, oceanographic research vessel. Get over it.

3:26Sophy Ridge:At least it's not, you know, an armoured ship. So perhaps they could intervene and stop it as opposed to attack it. Hopefully it doesn't get to that. So sticking on the topic of Russia, Sophie, this is a really interesting story as it relates to Russia, Ukraine and potential attempts to find peace. So Steve Witkoff is Trump's special envoy for these sorts of peace negotiations. Yesterday on social media, he reshared a report from the US news organization Axios, which suggested that secret negotiations between the US and Russia were happening again. and he started to type, he must have got this story from K.

4:09Sophy Ridge:The post was then deleted. So everyone thinks he was trying to send a private message not to do a post. They think K most probably is Kirill Dmitriev, who has become Putin's unofficial envoy to Washington, kind of Witkoff's opposite man.

4:26Wilfred Frost:I can't actually get my head around the fact that this is quite a serious guy here, right? You know, he's doing an important job and he just sends something by mistake publicly that he meant for a direct message. I mean, what on earth?

4:38Sophy Ridge:Well, what I find kind of confusing is he stopped short of finishing the message.

4:43Wilfred Frost:Well, maybe K is like a slang, you know. Is that how he calls them? Like special K?

4:48Sophy Ridge:I mean, anyway, let's get the summary of what this all means from our Mark Stone. This plan at the heart of it would see the Donbass, that is the whole of the area to the east of Ukraine, being given over to Russia, even the 15 or so percent of land that is currently not held by Russia. And in return, there would be some sort of a security guarantee by the Americans. But as yet, we still don't have detail on what that security guarantee will be. The final piece of this jigsaw is that the Europeans, the coalition of the willing, which includes the British, were not privy to this plan, and nor were the Ukrainians at the point at which it was drawn up.

5:23Sophy Ridge:if what's in this Axios report is true, as Mark was kind of alluding to, it's not a plan that on the face of it looks that fair to Ukraine. That said, President Zelensky, who's been in Turkey over the last couple of days, was speaking very warmly about President Trump and his efforts to find peace. So maybe more is happening behind the scenes. Maybe that's just Zelensky saying warm things to President Trump because he knows he has to either way. One to watch.

5:49Wilfred Frost:So Donald Trump has gone and signed the bill, which means that he has given the green light to the release of all of the files relating to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. We know, of course, and we've been talking about all week that US politicians have voted on it, passed it, but he's done it. Right. So the I's been dotted, the T's been crossed by Donald Trump himself. So now the US Justice Department has got 30 days to release all the documents. And it's going to be loads of stuff, right? It is going to be an absolute trove of stuff. All the investigations, prosecutions, custodial matters, flight logs, immunity deals.

6:25Wilfred Frost:I mean, there is an awful lot here. And I guess what everyone is waiting for is what on earth is in them? And particularly, is there going to be anything in them relating to Donald Trump himself?

6:36Sophy Ridge:There's also, is there still going to be stuff redacted as well? But either way, it's a big step. He signed the bill. Within 30 days, there's going to be a big trove of information for everyone to pour through. Sophie, I know you're a major bookworm. Well, waking up this morning, half of the UK's authors say they fear that AI could end up replacing their work entirely. Research from Cambridge found a majority of them say that they think their books are already being used to train generative models without their permission. There's a lot of fear out there for all sorts of creators about AI, But I think writing more than other areas is perhaps going to be most under threat.

7:20Wilfred Frost:I find the story really depressing, I'll be honest, because I think that they're right. I think that AI is going to have a huge impact on novelists, right? Because writing a novel is a long, arduous, time-consuming, difficult, creative task, right? And if you can get AI to do it quickly, cheaply, you don't have to pay any advances, then I can't see why publishers wouldn't start doing that. And the difficulty is, I think, that AI has obviously improved. It is improving all the time. But for me, you know, I'm somebody who, you know, books that kind of define my life in a way, novels in particular.

8:01Wilfred Frost:And I find the trend, firstly the trend about AI deeply worrying because I think that novels keep us in touch with humanity. I think they teach us empathy. I think they get us in the heads of other people so make us understand the world more and care more about other people and understand people who don't have the same views as us. And we're already seeing a crisis in book reading anyway, right? It's falling off a cliff. And, you know, I think it's something that should trouble us.

8:27Sophy Ridge:So MPs today are going to tell terrible dad jokes in the House of Commons to highlight their paternity leave concerns, which they say is the worst dad joke of all. Very brilliant, this. And we've got a few examples in here that we're going to hear later today. So the Liberal Democrat MP for Henley and Thames is saying, I used to hate facial hair, but then it grew on me. And then the Labour MP for Portsmouth North is Amanda Martin is going to say, a skeleton walks into a pub and says, I'll have a pint of lager and a mop, please.

9:03Wilfred Frost:That's quite good.

9:05Sophy Ridge:And obviously the point here is they're saying that the worst joke of all is the extent of paternity leave pay. and it's something that needs to be fixed.

9:13Wilfred Frost:I love this. I actually love a bad joke. Will, come on. Got a dad joke for us.

9:17Sophy Ridge:I do like telling dad jokes and sometimes he even laughs. Oh, very good. Very good. It doesn't quite work because my dad's not around anymore. But anyway. I think it adds to it. It still works. Exactly. So bad with my humour, he left the room. I love it. What I love about this as well is we just get to tell dad jokes all through the day because of it.

9:40Wilfred Frost:Yeah. so tell us your dad jokes the email address runs cheatsheet at sky.uk we love dad jokes brighten up our morning we have to go up very early

9:49Sophy Ridge:the best thing about having a child is the joy of having a child the second best thing is it then made my humour fit what it already was what dad joke terrible dad joke

9:58Wilfred Frost:I love it I love it that is it for today's cheat sheet I hope you've enjoyed all the episodes this week you can follow us on YouTube obviously listen wherever you're listening to this already you've probably found it out and also email us as well if you've got any story suggestions, if you've got any dad jokes that Wilf could nick and pass on with his name. Please do. We'd be very appreciative at cheatsheet at sky.uk. Do listen tomorrow as well when you've got Anna Jones and Kamali Melbourne who are going to have all the news you need in 10 minutes.

10:39Wilfred Frost:of humanity. I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.