Hot Cheeks and Cheesecake

Page 94, the private eye podcast. Hello and welcome to Page 94, the private eye podcast. I'm Helen Lewis and while Andy is away in his nuclear bunker, stocking up on tinned goods and water, I am joined by Adam McQueen in his lap and Matt Muir. We are starting in America. You might have heard of it, little place. It is the midterm elections next week and the Democrats are hoping to pick up the house. They think they might even pick up the Senate, but that does involve them going into very deep red territory, such as Alaska and Texas. So, because I feel like I've had my head in this stuff all the time, I've prepared your little quiz. I know how much you love your little quiz. Okay, let's start off with, how much money has Elon Musk spent this election cycle? Oh, I think I know this one. Is it half a billion quid? It's 336 million this election cycle and that is 276 million just since July. He's been absolutely pouring it in through both his own super pack and also into some of the other ones that are related to it. It may be the single biggest contribution in American political history. Is there any indication whatsoever that that spend has been moving the needle in the direction that he would presumably like it to be moved? Well, very pleasingly, not really. No, no. So, what he's been trying to do really, it seems to be he's been focusing on the get out the vote operation. So, the problem with this election cycle is that Trump is very unpopular. There are nonetheless people who turn out when he's on the ballot, as we know from the 2024 election in 2016. But those people just feel jaded. They're very affected by the high gas prices. You know, the war in Iran has been for some of them. They thought they were electing him exactly not to do foreign wars. So, the real worry of them and the Republicans is that their people just aren't going to turn up to the polling stations. So, most of the stuff. Is there generally a lower turnout for all these elections? For the presidential ones? Absolutely. And also, it favors the Democrats structurally because the people who turn out in midterms are more like to be college-educated, more like to be politically engaged. And that describes the Democratic coalition better at the moment. So, yeah, the Republicans are always kind of being slightly uphill. They don't have Trump on the ballot. So, they don't get the push of all the kind of die-hard Trump fans. But also, they do, unfortunately. We'll come to the next question. Have the problem that he is still around attracting attention. But actually, let's not be the barmer first, because he triggered some conservatives over the weekend, some terrible snowflakes. How did he describe Trump's White House deco? Was it the cheesecake factory as redesigned by Saudi Arabia? Very close. It was, he got the white. Well, that will come to that. He got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a cheesecake factory. So, for those of you who are not aware of American restaurants, the cheesecake factory notoriously has incredibly over-the-top like faked trust and deco. You combine that with Saddam Hussein. Did he have a gold toy? He did, yeah. Those dictators are always incredibly bling, aren't they? Yeah. That's kind of on the. Anyway, so that's. That was what our barmer said. Anyway, it caused an absolute conniption all over X with people saying, "Have very day. "Take the good name of the cheesecake factory in Bay." But property development stuff. The exact producer of Megan Kelly's show, said this was snobbery. He was using it as a stand-in for Flyover Magonite Act. For a bonus point, where was the first cheesecake factory location? Birmingham. [LAUGHTER] Alabama, obviously. Yeah. On the grounds that you can use it very easily. Very good. What? [LAUGHTER] A lot of thought into that. And I appreciate that. It was, of course, the Magover Flyover country of Beverly Hills, California. OK. For a bonus point. I love the fact that it's not the sedan bit of the controversial bit anymore. You know, having done years with the other side, calling him Barrett Kassena Barmer and trying to make that sort of. No, no, no. I've never said that. It's about the cheesecake factory now. So it's back to class now. Yeah. We've done race and religion. [LAUGHTER] So it's snobbery. It made me so nostalgic for the time in which a presidential scandal was like, do you remember Obama wore a tan suit? Did he, was he going to wear a flag pin? Did he, at one point, lean over a plastic counter. I just thought, do you remember this? That was a day of a new cycle. Do you remember the terrorist fist bump that him and Michelle did? Yeah. The Fox said was a terrorist sign when you do a fist bump. And I was just like, and now, like a presidential scandal is, you know, your sons are on a crypto company with the UAE. You appear to be selling pardons. But anyway, I enjoyed that. For a bonus point, I think you might get this one. What did Bill Clinton say the new White House patio look like? There's definitely something about Liberace in it. There was. I know Adam's favorite go-to Trump reference is Liberace. He said-- Was it McDonald's designed by Liberace? You need a random number in generator. You just find someone very camp. That's a great American institution. It was like, Applebee. I'm trying. And, yeah, in Melbourne, Marcos. Yes, it looks like the entrance to Liberace's bathroom. Ah, wow. So that was Bill Clinton. It makes the question, how does he know? He's spent a number of years there. He's an equal opportunity's lover. Oh, yeah. I 100% believe that Bill Clinton might have been to Liberace's bathroom. What nation, this weekend in Michigan, did Trump describe as a shit house country? Oh, Norway, Norway. Do you know why? Because it won't give him the Nobel Prize Award. It's so pathetic. Last week in the issue, we did a joke. The Trump call of ended with him saying, I hate Norway. If they don't give me the prize this time, I'm going to invade. You're scripting him, man. Well, at least someone is. Yeah. He really did. He didn't even want Norwegian immigrants in the US. I'll say it won't give him the peace plan. However, you can obviously immigrate from FIFA. We don't give him the peace prize. What did he say about Michigan's Senate candidate, Abdel El-Side? Jihadist. It was, it's a days of Jihadist. That's his talk. For a while, they were pushing communist, weren't they? Is it the radical Democrat communist? They were trying to do. Jihadist now is there. And also the desperate side for everybody on the Democratic side to specifically disavow the nation of Islam. Muslim brotherhood. It's the Muslim brotherhood. The Muslim brotherhood. And also Hassan Piker, the streamer. We had a lot of Hassan Piker discourse. But yeah, Abdel El-Side would be the first Muslim senator. So he's decided, Trump has arbitrarily decided to rename him Muhammad. He's going, I know that's on his name, but that's what I'm going to call him. It's not allowed, it's not allowed. Are there any libel laws at all in America? I mean, are you allowed to say someone's a member of the Muslim brotherhood if they aren't? The rule for a public figure is that it has to be like malicious. Well, that's clear from Trump. You have to know that it's not true and say it anyway. You're like, there's a careless disregard. Well, that is a deficit. Yes, that's a definition of Trump, isn't it? It's not pretty much. Yeah, kind of. I mean, he has run, and it was quite funny. I did a tweet because I was a thing about linking, this was the Hassan Piker stuff, who has said that America deserved 9/11. And there was a lot about the fact that El-Side had campaigned with Hassan Piker. And it was, to me, it was very obvious that this was both a legitimate criticism of itself, but also a way to say Islamic sounding name plus 9/11 a lot. And I said this out loud and lots of people screamed at me. And then this is the great thing about the Trump era. Trump just came up and went, "No, I really did mean that." Like, I really do think they said, you know, he shouldn't be allowed to seat in the Senate. He shouldn't be allowed even a seat on an airplane. He's a jihadist, and yeah, and he's sort of a secret Islamist. But you're right, that simultaneously he was meant to be too woke and also an Islamist, which is a difficult vendor. No, no. A difficult vendor. I noticed Trump saying that if he got inside the White House, he would have access to all sorts of secrets. And I thought, well, you didn't mind when the writers dressed up in buffalo horns. When did that seem to be fine? Well, what is it that you can find out by just sitting? And also, the secrets aren't there anymore. They're in his bathroom in Mara-Lago, and all those boxes. Finally, who, according to Trump, has a great ass? Everyone. Every man he's seen in the past month, basically. That is actually the correct answer. Yes. It started off with a higher Senator John Hustard, who he said, "I don't do this with men very often. I started examining his body because I didn't know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down because I looked at his ass. And then he said a week later, "I then pated him on the shoulder." And it was like a piece of steel, and still recovering. Wow. It's amazing, isn't it? I watched up and down. He didn't even look like he did that as well when he was doing it. Oh. I know. That was maybe about the soldiers. He was also talking about how great it was to be president, because you got guarded by hot young soldiers. Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not hot. No, right. Some of them were women. Sleepy Joe took his eyes off the sexy prize once again, right? It was like, but there were some reasons to be pressed for. It's kind of extraordinary. Is there any explanation for this? I mean, we could hazard one. So Trump and the people in his orbit have an absolute fascination with the classical world, specifically ancient Rome. I mean, draw your own conclusions. Right. You're saying the decor reflects the general approach to. I think, you know, they like lots of aspects of the ancient world. And, you know, the approach to the fine contours of the young male body may well be one of them. They are weirdly obsessed with masculinity and testosterone. So surely, Trump should be flattered by a liberal artsy reference. Yeah. Fellow Edmara. I mean, the very odd thing about it is that Trump has actually been back when he was a Democrat. He was very gay friendly, went to a studio in '50s. He did the gayest thing in the world, actually. He went to Liza Monelli's wedding. Wow. That's. Well, as groom. That is the gayest thing in the world. And Liza Monelli isn't sure where she was her own wedding. But yeah, so I think it's a very odd thing where he's obviously become more disinhibited. But he has been saying things like this for a while. It's just that he hasn't really got anything else to say. He's sort of pressing the big racism button and he's not getting the rise out of it anymore. He's got a lot of things he doesn't want to talk about, hasn't he? Yeah. But he still wants to do sort of great erasions for three hours in front of an audience in a full stage. Is this your point about. Is it a good idea for him to go out on the stump? Right, because he, but you're right because what happens with the the home? man asked material is that people kind of like tit erratic because they're like, "Am I hearing this? Am I having a stroke? What's happening?" And then he just doesn't, and he repeats it and he expands on it, which has always been how he does his, his speeches. But the problem is actually, he doesn't have a great thing to say about the economy apart from it's all Joe Biden's fault. And then every so often he will just say actually we're selling an awful lot of, you know, oil being that high isn't really a problem, I don't really care. So in a way, if you're as advisors, you're probably encouraging him to do more of them. It's just lining up, or asses in front of it. Look at that guy over there. Yeah. What about the him not going out option? Do you think the advisors considered this and thought well maybe the Republican candidates should sell themselves? I think that there's a feeling that he is so visible in American life anyway that you might as well try and again come back to the must point, try and energize your base. But what's interesting is he's going to places that should be very strongly Republican. You would think this is a waste of time sending your president there. And that may have two things. One, he may just want the comfort blanket of just having people who agree with him. He's worried about protesters. Or two, it might suggest they're more worried about turnout again, like the like the mask money that are their voters just actually going to stay at home. They have a category in American voters, which I think we'd have to expand here because of our multi-party system, which is called the double hater. And they hate the Republicans and they hate the Democrats. And for those people, some of them turned into kind of anti-establishment voters. But now they are back to just hating everyone. Obama had another good line, which was like he promised to drain the swamp and actually he just drained the reflecting which I was always quite sassy and I enjoyed that. But the other thing about that Obama speech made me think was the fact that it is a real incentive to elect younger presidents because then when they leave office, you've got a good 20 years of them being elder statesmen, hopefully still popular because people like their term going out and stomping for you. Just like this happened with Tony Blair here, right? The Obama effect never struck me as big enough. You know, he intervenes, it doesn't move anything. He's incredibly still incredibly popular, particularly with black voters. And Michelle Obama is absolutely a catnip. Obama was in Michigan, for example, because that's got a particularly round Detroit, a very big black population that they need to turn out for Abdul el-Sayed, who that voting block was tough for him in the primary. They mostly meant for his primary opponent. So that's with a strategic deployment of Obama in certain communities. Yeah, but equally well, there are also just a lot of people who absolutely hate him. And that's the other thing is actually is a good press if you trigger the cons, the lesser known version of triggering the libs. So I'm going to try to get Michelle Obama to write. It's one of the weirdest things about America that having specifically rejected a monarchy instead of a republic. They are really keen on her registry politics, although they do like their dynasty. They're not quite as much as in India where you have to be. Your surname has to be Gandhi, if you'd prefer anything. Well, they love it. It's been a big deal that several members of the Bush family have endorsed James Talleriko's, the Democratic candidate in Texas. And you know, essentially, why do I care? But they do love a bit of dynastic politics. For example, up in New Hampshire, the candidate for the Republican candidate for Senate is the brother of a former Republican governor. And you think this is a country of 300 million people that find me somebody who's not related to everybody else. Does George W. Bush still intervene in things when he's still young. He paints his main interventions seem to be posting his own interpretations, artistic interpretations of current events. Okay. Have you not seen that he painted for the 25th anniversary of 9/11? His own painting of him being told about the second tower being here. It's genuinely beautiful. Right. It's very moving. Well, great. Oh, it works. It's the Armageddon moment. Yeah. Can I ask you a question? Yes. To get voters out for the Republicans who don't want to get out, what do you have to tell them? I get you spend lots of money. What are you doing to get them out? What do you say? Well, you say our opponents are evil socialists. Our opponents are islamists. Our opponents are woke people who want to trans your kids. So the musk. No, I'm genuinely, so musk has been running a load of ads in places like Texas because he lives in Texas. He's very energized about that. The Texas candidate for the Republicans is a complete clunker. This Ken Paxton, who was the attorney general, who's a sort of petty crook been impeached by his own side, but massively sucked up to Trump. So Trump gave him the thumbs up in the primary and he defeated the incumbent senator, John Cornyn. So that's one of musk's big focuses. One of his super PACs most visible ads on Facebook, The New York Times reported, features a man in makeup and reads, "He made his plan to vote. Did you? Don't stay home while crazy, select radicals." So that's it. That's it. Basically, you can now try and turn out the vote by showing essentially pictures of like, "I'd add a man." And just go, "Is this what you want America?" To look like. Yeah. Given that now, you don't accept election results in the Brazilian election, is Trump likely to contest the midterms? Is he going to say, "This is fake. We didn't lose." I mean, I'm sure he'll say that. I can't imagine a world in which he goes, "You're right. They do hate me." They're all on the stage. All right, stupid question. But there's stuff going around on X literally this morning with people because early voting has started in some states and people talking about how, well, the voting machine's a rick and sharing fake stuff. So this is already the astroturfing of this stuff. He did some setting up for that specifically, didn't he? Didn't he talk about Chinese interference? There's a bit of that. And there's also, in Alaska, they've filed a lawsuit. I've wrote about this in the magazine because there's a Dan S Sullivan, which is a Republican candidate, Annie Dan J Sullivan, who is. Well, he's an independent, but he's essentially there as a kind of spoiler candidate. They're hoping people would tick the wrong box on the form. Oh, like the literal Democrat. There was a challenger, one of our general elections in which someone ran as a literal Democrat and the Lib Dem, who was, you know, polling quite strongly, didn't do as well as expected and changed it. So you have a Democrat candidate, a Republican candidate, and then an independent candidate with almost exactly the same name. Matt, I have a question for you. Is the internet about to fall apart? I mean, I don't know if it's about to fall apart, but where I, given the gift of running everything, I probably wouldn't build all of the world's significant infrastructure on it right now. So the PHP story that was all over the news last week is effectively a single expression of a very, very, very large problem. PHP is a bit of code that is used on what is estimated to be roughly around 70% of the world's websites. But thanks to AI over the summer, a combination of these vulnerabilities were found to give a very easy exploit, which could theoretically give bad actors access to the server on which website ran, which would enable them to either change the website, inject bad code into it, or alternatively to scrape and steal a bunch of sensitive data from users of that website. The news about that leak last week, hence this mad scramble to patch this, patches were issued, websites went offline while the patches were deployed, which is why some council websites went offline in the UK, for example, certain bit of Wikipedia offline, and PHP is just one bit of code. It just so happened to be one that's all over the internet. The thing is about the internet, it's basically been built up like a shantytown. I thought you were going to say it's a series of tubes. It's also that, but it's basically being sort of coupled together like a shantytown. Right, because this was the thing I find most fascinating about this, is that there was one guy whose name was Andre Surrey, who lives in Czechia, who was in charge of basically putting in preventing the patch. Not even in charge. He's just some bloke who's an enthusiast. He has a day job. There exists out there a PHP foundation, which is 13 people, which is not for profit, which is funded by charities, and this is a group of people who've been sort of, I was going to say intimate with the code, which sounds weird and wrong, but you know what I mean? For decades, because this is all code, right? It's developed in the mid-90s, I think, '94, I found on the stake and by Danish guy. The person you reference isn't part of this. He's just somebody who's a real enthusiast and really likes it and really cares about this, and what he did when this patch was issued for this technology, he created a bunch of software that allowed that patch to be easily deployed, because you don't just get to patch, you then have to put the patch on to the servers where the websites live and all the rest of it. So it's actually far more significant job. And so thanks to him, this was all able to be done worldwide, because he wrote a bunch of code very, very quickly, as opposed to it taking a lot more time and things being left vulnerable. But it's a really good, so there's an excellent and very famous cartoon, if you're a certain flavor. It's going to be 8KCD, isn't it? Randall Monroe and the cartoon displays this very, very, very sort of large, complex sort of interlocking series of boxes, all of which kind of teeters, and then it's supported by one very, very, very small box and labeling that box is a small repository of codes maintained by middle aged man, somewhere in Nebraska. So much of the code upon which the internet, the web rests is stuff that was written by hobbyists or people who just sort of really into it, years and years and years and years ago. And it's been maintained by the community in those same hobbyists, but no one owns it. And this is where AI comes into it. The vulnerabilities around the internet, are in many respects not an AI story. This is just a series of systems that have been built in really complex and interlocking ways without anyone paying attention to how they're built, or indeed what any of the building blocks are made out of. And is the contribution of AI? This is where I come into skeptic to find out things that we didn't need to know and mess everything up, by pointing out these vulnerabilities and then publicizing them. People have been trying to hack websites in the internet since they ever existed, right? You know, they're a bad actor, criminals, or even just board kits. Because a lot of this stuff you have to remember is just board kits. It's what you call script kitties if you're a hacker. People who are just doing it for kudos, doing it for fun, see that they can. This isn't a new thing. This is always something that people have had to worry about. Like even before AI, you know, we've heard of people hacking websites and things for years and years and years and years. The difference is that what AI has done, which is all of the stuff that's anthropic and open AI have been warning about out of Bockelip, particularly in many respects. is super charge the ability for vulnerabilities to be discovered. So the PHP thing, for example, is a really interesting case in point. These vulnerabilities have existed for a long time. It was just the AI discovered that if you do a certain thing that combines these two vulnerabilities, it gives you a really easy way into a load of websites that you can then mess with. AI is going to find loads of these vulnerabilities, which on the one hand is good because it means you can create patches for them and you can then fix them and the vulnerabilities go away, which makes for a safer and more stable internet. Unfortunately, what AI also does is as soon as you deploy a patch for something, it makes it trivially easy to compare the patched version with the old version, find the exploit, and before everyone's had time to implement the patch, go around exploiting it. So you suddenly get into this thing where you have this accelerating arms race of people finding vulnerabilities, people deploying the code to patch the vulnerabilities, and then people have to deploy them fast enough to prevent people using the vulnerabilities to get in before they're patched. Can I also ask you about AI agents? Do you have any AI agents back? They are all out there writing my columns for next week. As I sit here talking to you about that. It's not what agents do. Agents just take 15% of them. What are you talking about? Did you come up? And you're always being fleece somewhere. I do not currently, I have worked with them because I am curious about this. So let's talk about it to the really super basic thing. So the one that is released last month, September, is Meta's Muse, which you plug in basically to a bunch of your personal sensitive stuff, like your calendar and your mail, and it promises to decide what dinner you should have. Try and book restaurants for you, like that kind of stuff. Essentially, all of these seem to be like, I would like a stay-at-home wife. And instead, I've got an AI agent to do this stuff for me. It's like what every mid-century kind of man wanted was a secretary, right? So you never have to touch the kind of grubby commerce of everyday life where you have to book your own restaurants. I'll be honest with you. There's a lot of this that doesn't sound that bad. So it's an AI agent. AI agents are AI programs that can be directed by a user to go off and undertake tasks autonomously. You give them certain permissions and they can act on your behalf. So the one that Meta launched last week, which is, or last month, excuse me, which is the first sort of major consumer facing variants of this. They've existed since basically the beginning of the year, but this is the first time that they've been marketed at normal people. It sold us two things. It sold us a money-saving system because Meta says that you can, for example, one of the use cases it gives it, is that you can give the AI agent access to your inbox and you can go through all your emails and look at all the subscriptions you're currently paying for and all the ones that you might have forgotten and check the ones that way you don't open any of the emails, but you still subscribe to them while they go to spam and automatically cancel all of those subscriptions for you, objectively kind of a useful thing. And Meta says that it can save the average household up to a thousand pounds a year on those sorts of things, or by haggling for better deals, save for the sake of argument, right? You have an insurance provider or maybe you're on a certain gas tariff and you can tell your agent's going to find preferential rates based on what it knows about you, your domestic circumstances, et cetera, and it can go off and it can renegotiate those and then save you money as a result of that. The other use case is primarily for shopping. You can tell the AI agent, I need X, Y and Z products going to find me the best things in this category, the best deals, make sure that it's the cheapest one available to me at the time and then go off and buy it if you give it access to all of these things. And so these things can go off and work kind of on their own. Who are these people though? I mean, I live in a household where we had, I would say, maybe three months of discussion about what forks we were going to buy and then attempt to find the, like, the ear fork, the best fork there are. These people are putting a lot of trust in, like, just buy a tele for me. Yeah, I don't know. Just wherever one. I mean, I think there's lots of people don't really care. They just want a tele in the same way that lots of people don't want to spend any time thinking about the gas tariff they have. But I think that's the thing is that from the moment there's a great bit of arbitrage, right, which is essentially your AI agent versus a system that was not built for it. So at some point, if everyone does remember to cancel their expensive tariff, they will just put all of the prices up. Yeah. I mean, the economic implications of this as with all AI related things, curious. And it, let's be clear, subscription market, the subscription economy is vast. It's not inconceivable that the mass adoption of techniques like this kill that because these all subsist on people paying for a more subscription, as you say, the whales at the top end of it. Can I just point out that there are no unwanted subscriptions and private eye. There is no possibility of AI cancelling it. But as you say, you're right. As soon as this stuff starts to get deployed on mass, so I've given you the too much frivolous use cases, right? Shopping and canceling subscriptions. But there's some really interesting thinking happening among people who used to work at government digital services and things like that about what happens when you have autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of people, where people have given them access to all sorts of things about their life intersecting with government services. So for example, council websites. So what happens when the GP's booking system starts to get overwhelmed by all of these agents. That's right. I will get eaten. Yeah, they can phone and do voice calls, so it will phone up the GP receptionist to be shouted out by the GP receptionist to find British tradition. But then they will just keep phoning back and phoning back. Yeah. I think this is a huge problem for government. I think it's going to be something we're going to end up reporting on the magazine. The concept of it sounds terrifying to me. I've spent 30 years with people telling me never to give anyone access to your emails or your banking. Yeah, and suddenly it's like, we've didn't know. It's just hand this over to you. But it's okay, it's a matter of famously. They're incredibly good at dealing carefully and safely with people's data and resulting uses of it. But we've had stories in the magazine. There was one in street of shame about freedom of information requests, where people can just sledge them. There's going to be things like that, like parents making complaints to schools or people complaining to be information commissioners office. At the moment, effort is a kind of proxy for how much you care about something, right? You have to really invest your most precious resources, your one human life into this. Whilst on the one hand, I completely agree with you. Objectively speaking, there are lots of ways in which large businesses in the corporate world act to screw consumers due basically to making systems complex, impenetrable, incredibly tedious, and people just bouncing off them. And it's hard to see it being a bad thing to enable consumers to maybe rest some of that power back. But yeah, it's the worst. It'll be people like us. It'll be people who are more educated, more technology competent, younger, more digitally savvy, who will use this to get themselves better prices. All this stuff is going to help young professionals argue down their gas bill. I'm not sure it's going to help an eight-year-old who's struggling to heat their house and doesn't have a smartphone. I don't know if you've noticed, but Metra has become very, very good at selling its products to people in their doge. It's a mainstream consumer-facing business that is not for young people. It is literally the infrastructure of the planet. The earnings call last week is what? It's nearly four billion people. I think I retract that, mate. Metra has ever only thought otherwise vulnerable amongst us. The key point of this is that everything is connected to the web, which means everything is vulnerable. Your television is connected to the web. Your phone obviously is connected to the web. Your fridge, if Samsung has its way, will one day be connected. The grid. The water, like everything. Everything is a potential attack vector and it always has been. But the opportunity for those vectors to be found and exploited and for that to happen at scale has never been greater. Now, there's an interesting question here because we're legislating hard at the moment or we're talking about legislating hard. So at the moment, as we speak, the House of Lords is doing its first random report stage on the Subsecurity and Resilience spill, which make them into actual proper force in 2028, which is reassuring. But the point is there's loads of that stuff about the responsibility of providers to find vulnerabilities and alert users to them. It doesn't say anything about how we're going to fix them. You can't just get AI to do the fixes because you don't know that the code, the fixes that AI is deploying work because you need a human to check them. You can't just trust this stuff. It's very easy for bad actors to fool AI into injecting bad code into systems. This is without wishing to get too easy to do. It's a bit like, oh, let me just download this new Chinese made patch. I'm sure it's really good. Adam, what aren't you telling me? Oh, so many things. There is a trial going on this week of an injunction case in the case of PPT who has described as a well-known individual. We did PHP earlier now within PPT. Hang on to that one. This well-known individual currently has a temporary injunction, restricting some reporting by two media organisations. There was a previous hearing on 5 October, which established that the identity of the claimant, PPT, who has accused of serious allegations about his conduct over a period of years in a variety of professional and personal contexts. I'm quoting very carefully from from legal documents here. We know that they involve allegations from three women, including at least one sexual offence, and we know that these allegations might get to the level of criminal offences. So essentially, PPT doesn't want the two media organisations named to publish these allegations, and the reason for that is. Well, there are two things about this. I've covered an awful lot of injunctions and back in the day super injunctions and things for private AI. There's two very unusual things about this, which I've not come across before. The first is that not only did PPT try to anonymise himself, which is fairly standard, he also tried to anonymise the names of the two media organisations that they couldn't be revealed either. Now that's extraordinary. I don't think that's. Have you ever heard of that before? No, no, that is extraordinary. But that failed, didn't it? That did fail. That was turned down at a court hearing earlier this month. So we do now know that the two media organisations involved are the Guardian and Independent Television News, or ITN, who of course are the provider for ITV News and for Channel 4 News as well. It's not entirely clear. The excuse for this was that identifying them would materially weaken the protection afforded by his own anonymity. and could assist some people in identifying him. Well, you can't quite see how. I mean, my suspicion is slightly that it's out there that it is a well-known individual and two media organisations. There's could be any media organisations. You know, there could be the weekly world news and national enquirer, some downmarket tabloid or something. The fact that it's the Guardian who, for example, exposed Noel Clark, who subsequent to a libel trial, which he lost very spectacularly has since been arrested and charged with sexual offenses against women and ITN, who were involved in the final exposure of Jimmy Savile, if you remember that. There's a sort of credibility to the fact that those are the organisations. So that fact is out there now. The other thing that's really unusual about this is usually, in the case of injunctions, it's on privacy law. And specifically, it's the European convention on human rights, which has article eight is the right to privacy, and it goes against article 10, which is freedom of expression. And those are traditionally what judges try and weigh up in court cases, which one takes precedence over the other one. Not in this case. Two entirely different articles of the convention, which are number two, the rights to life. And number three, which is protection from degrading treatment, now specifically, it's actually headed as protection from torture. So no one is suggesting that this, this well-known individual is actually going to be tortured, but they're using that legislation because the reason that they are seeking this injunction is that they say, and we'll be bringing medical evidence to court this week, to say that they are experiencing great mental health problems as a result of the potential exposure of these allegations, and even being asked questions by ITN and the Guardian about these allegations, which we should say this person broadly denies. But they said essentially that they've been suicidal about this, and that they have been involuntarily committed to psychiatric holds over the summer. This is a serious mental health crisis brought about by the allegations, and that's where the right to life comes in, right? Essentially, the premise, as far as I can see, if you're going to state it very broadly, is if this allegations put against me, I will probably kill myself, and then the media organisations do not have a right to make the allegations. - That's absolutely it. The wording is publication would expose him to a continuing risk to life arising from suicide. - How do you feel about that, Ian? 'Cause I've got very strong opinions on this one. I wonder if they're the same as yours. - I would say that is not what those two articles were designed for. They were designed to people who are being threatened to be killed, and threatened to be tortured for what they believe say or do, which are entirely different. And if it were to be established that what you had to say, if someone said, "Have you been doing this?" Is to say, "I will not answer that question due to my mental health, and I might kill myself." That's the end of reporting on all serious issues. Financial, personal, governmental, and everything else. So I think, I don't know how extreme you, I think that's a bad idea. - I mean, I think it's a very bad idea because for a couple of different reasons, one of which is that, ethically already, as a publication, you should be saying, I always think that's why I'm do story about somebody that will expose them to a huge amount of heat. How will I feel if this really gives them a breakdown? Is there a public interest that's worth it? Those are questions that I'm sure, I think given that it's guiding ITN, they will have asked themselves anyway. - They absolutely will, yes. - At the same time, the complainants also have a right to be heard and a right to life, and that's the thing that bothers me. And then, frankly, the third thing as a broader principle that bothers me is that threats of suicide are sometimes used as a coercive and abusive tactic. And that is something that I worry about legitimating if you pass a ruling like this, that everybody essentially says, "You can't do X 'cause I'll kill myself." And that is now embedded in our law. That's my real fear about this. - The real fear is the legal precedent that's gonna be set by it. - Yeah, I mean, no one wants to be responsible for, or even for the feeling that someone has taken their own life because of it, it's obviously a particularly sensitive topic at the moment because of the case of Jason Arday over the summer. But it is also increasingly being used as a way of shutting down coverage. I mean, you might remember the initial Hugh Edwards reporting in the Sun. His wife, ex-wife now, she came at the time and said, she revealed that Hugh Edwards was the person who hadn't been named at that point, but also said he was in hospital suffering from serious mental health issues, which he was. There's no denying that in any way. But it meant that that whole story died down as a result until the police brought charges that were much, much more serious than what had initially been reported in the Sun. In that case, I've also been warned off a story about a senior figure at a media organisation in the last couple of years. When he faced this a plan reaction, it was on the same grounds. I put questions in to the press office of that organisation and was told, "Look, you really need to back off on this story." And those exact conversations that you're talking about, they happen. And you do feel a big responsibility for that. Sinically, within his own office, that man was referred to then as doing a Hugh Edwards and getting out of answering questions. As an example of a journalist being lawful of their own colleagues. So you don't want to be cynical about this. Maybe people do suffer serious mental health crises when faced with the consequences of their actions. It reminds me, actually, do you remember at the height of the privacy injunction, super injunction for a re-back in early 2010s? What you did then, the trend, was that you went to court and said you were being blackmailed. And you can present, you know, if a newspaper organisation comes to you with questions, which we usually in those cases about someone's sex life, you know, it was Kiss and Tails in the news of the world of papers like that. If you went to court and said, "Well, I'm being blackmailed." I mean, Threaten, they're saying that they want to expose me. That was sort of automatically judges who were around them, particularly Mr. Justice E.D. sort of whacked it straight down. You just got an injunction without any questions being asked. Blackmail, of course, is a serious criminal offence. And in not one of those cases, I know it was cited in the Jeremy Clarkson injunction in the Ryan Giggs injunction, and an awful lot of ones that still remain in place and remain anonymized. Not one of those that I know of was there, whether every criminal charges brought or anyone reported the police, I don't think, even on the grounds that they were blackmailing people. So there is a way, and there is no one more cynical than lawyers, but lawyers will use any kind of exploitation, effectively, or existing legislation to set a precedent, which then causes an awful lot of problems down the line. So I'm talking very, very carefully about this, not just for legal reasons and the bits that I'm not allowed to say by a court at the moment, but there is a whole difficult sort of set of ethical questions around this. And it is a change in climate, isn't it? From presenting questions and attempting to uncover allegations about robust criminal people who didn't care to a climate where almost anyone is going to suffer some psychological harm through particularly the revelations are true. I mean, this is going to take an effect on your life. Does that mean no one's allowed to do any of this? - That's the bit that really worries me is that inevitably if you publish serious allegations about somebody, whether they're true or not, that probably does destroy their life. And that is the cause of a serious mental health crisis. And you have to go into it knowing that that's a real possibility. Can we just talk a little bit about the broader legal climate? Because the other thing that's been happening at the same time as this, well, two things. Let's talk a bit about Russell Brand's podcasting, Chobis Odyssey around his trial on very serious sexual offenses, which he denies. He and his wife have been doing extraordinary podcasts in their dressing games throughout the trial. Given the contempt laws, it seems to be kind of an extraordinary thing to do. How was your take on it? - I think it's extraordinary. I mean, as a reminder to listeners who might be less familiar with them, contempt or court laws basically say that you can only make a contemporaneous report of ongoing criminal trials what actually was said in court in front of the jury on that day. And there's a very, very serious reason for that, which is that the jury have to consider the case on the merits of what is presented in court. They can't take any, if you've ever done jury service, you get a very, very stern warning right at the outset from the judge who says you are not to look and you're not to Google anything. You're not to look this case up on the internet. You cannot find out anything beyond that. And they take extremely seriously anyone who has seen to be bringing in information from outside. So that applies to all reporters. And to all people on social media as well, least in theory, in practice, it doesn't quite work that way. But you have to be very, very careful not to introduce anything into the court. And an example I can give you of that, the case of Constance Martin and Mark Gordon, who you remember with a couple that ran away with their baby. - The baby ran in the back. - The baby, they died. It was really, really horrible case. Went through two separate trials, one of which was nearly clapsed by, in that case, it was the Daily Mail website. It had been agreed, as is quite often the way in kind of pre-trial hearings that some things are excluded from the trial. In that case, the fact that Mark Gordon had a previous conviction for rape was not to be presented before the jury in the trial. And the mail put it in a headline online, which was a bit of a co-cup and senior executives from the mail were hauled into court and dressed ambush. There was immediate unapplication by the defense to try and have the whole jury dismissed and the trial started again, which didn't actually happen in that case. In more recent one last week. So, Kiran Hailer, who is the ex-husband of Katie Price, was on trial at Lewis Crown Court. He was found not guilty of rape and sexual assault. And in that case, the judge criticized Katie Price for what the defense had termed an overwhelming tsunami of prejudice which she launched from witness box when it came to her turn. Basically, she just spilled out all of this stuff that shouldn't have gone in front of the jury. And in that case, there was again, unsuccessful application by the defense to discharge the jury and start a whole new trial in that case. So, these things are taken incredibly seriously. But this comes back to something that we've talked about in this podcast before, which is my feeling, and I shouldn't have yet to share it here, that our contempt of court court laws are a very difficult fit for the social media environment. When you've got a situation where traditional media largely obey them and reporting restrictions to and social media is a free-fall, it risk creating this sense that actually the media are covering stuff up there with holding stuff from you. And they must be doing it for a sinister reason. And the example that we're given this is Michael Gove's ex-girlfriend, Lola Salem, who was a lecturer at Oxford Roque for Education. number of right-wing publications. She is going to be on trial in March of 2028. It's a long time ago, on charges relating to possession of an indecent image of a child, which she denies. But the story was published about this and then taken down. And I saw all over my Instagram, this is an establishment cover-up, it's because she dated Michael Gove, it's a huge conspiracy theorist. It was slightly let down that conspiracy through by the fact that a few days later, one of the papers concerned the male published a much, much more comprehensive piece, which made explicit as the first piece hadn't her links to Michael Gove and carried an awful lot more detail about the case. And then now Michael Gove's ex-wife Sarah Vine, who happens to be a male on Sunday columnist, has written about it extensively in her column and her feelings about the case as well. Which I would think was sort of pushing at the envelope, but as you say, the trial is a very long way off yet. So that's also something that's taken into account. Yeah. When the story broke that this injunction was out, obviously the first thing that I did as any good scourulous member of the public would do was go on to the least-regulated social platform I could think of I.X. And see who everybody said to this person was. How does any of this practically work? This is a genuine question. I mean, it doesn't. I mean, you remember the Ryan Giggs injunction. Everyone knew it was Ryan Giggs long before, whichever MP it was stood up in, it was John Heming. John stood up in court and I just stood up in Parliament rather and announced that. So what's quite interesting in this, the initial judgment, the one taking away the anonymity or VTN and the Guardian, the judge was very clear that the fact that a lot of people know the facts in this particular story doesn't mean that the injunction doesn't apply, you know, it can still remain private. But I mean, that is the sort of slightly mad world. And consider the circulation numbers of the Guardian, for example, versus the number of people who will have been algorithmically shown posts on a certain social network, naming a certain individual, the disparity there seems stark and kind of mad, right? So what happens if you are somebody who gets falsely linked to this? If the room is brains of it's you, what match will redress you have at that point? None whatsoever. You don't really want to come out and say, by the way, I'm actually not a sex offender. Because then the headline is your name and I'm not a sex offender. Yeah, and that's in a very serious case. I'm going to remember way back in the the the big injunction for Gaby Logan. The sports presenter had to come out and say she wasn't having a fair with Jeremy Clocks. Because that was a sort of Chinese whispers. Was it Jim, Jim, to my car as well? I think she very, yeah, she said. You're absolutely right. Gaby Logan denied an affair with Alan Shira. For more. None of these people are involved in any injunction at all. No, cases. But that's the sort of Chinese whispers with going in the web. But then that's that's an affair, which is fairly serious to you and your partner, possibly. But, you know, these are cases of serious sexual allegations against people. So you do get into a whole dangerous area with that. And there are mad. I mean, even putting aside social media. I mean, I mentioned the the Constance Martin and Martin Golden Case. The really weird thing about that was, of course, when they'd been on the run for ages, there was massive amounts of publicity about their background. And the fact that he had a conviction for rape in America had been splattered all over news reports, which was still available on the internet. So you have this slightly mad situation that anyone could find that, but it couldn't be mentioned in any of the reporting of the ongoing courage. What I would say, though, is that you also get into a really, really dangerous area with other reporting restrictions, which are when to say reporting restrictions, people think super in terms of stenosis. So there are very, very standard ones, which protect the anonymity of any complainant in sexual assault case or rape case. Very, very good reasons. And particularly any children who might be the victim of sex crimes. And any family relationships, right? There's a really big like this. I think this happened around the baby p cases that one of reasons that was anonymised was about protecting the other children, the family, not producing future trials. That kind of stuff is very difficult that people can often think, well, why are we not getting the full information on that? It's like, well, if you had the full information, it would identify somebody who's potentially the victim of a serious sexual offense, which I think anyone who isn't just immediately, you know, posting on Twitter or something, stops and talks about that for a few minutes. Those are extremely good reasons. And people go, so you've got to find a system that kind of works. Or linked trials, right? This was the one that Tommy Robinson got in trouble for, because there were there were grooming game trials going on. And he went and broadcast from the steps of the court. And actually, the reporting restrictions there was the fact that some of those defendants were going to go on and be in other trials. And therefore, they wanted to wait until all of them so that the later ones would be fair. So blaring out stuff that was happening at that time, stood a very good chance of never being those for the trials for other criminal offences that have been committed against women. There are lots of good reasons for, you know, some legal restrictions. What I interested in is why people on X think, I know nothing about this case. I have no idea about the facts. I'm going to say some names because in it does really good numbers. I have an enormous sympathy for it, because these people are nosy, which is also I am. And that's why I became a journalist. I can understand why if everybody's talking about something, you'd want to be one of the people, it will be the standard conversation down the path, which effectively is what X is these days is, is though, I mean, everyone will be trying to guess at it, wouldn't it? Ian, do you think the balance at the moment with all of this stuff is in the right place? Because it's always going to be shuffling one side of the other and going too far in one direction? This strikes me as sort of moving towards territory that we haven't been in before. And part of me thinks, well, I mean, why should you be allowed to arrest people or put them in jail? Because that's very bad for their mental health. And lots of people get put in jail and then try and commit suicide. It doesn't stop you doing it. I'm not saying the full weight of the law is the same as us journalists posing questions. But we are in the same market here. We are in the same world. And I think moving that way is really unhelpful. And a lot of the unpleasant and grim questions that came up after the R.D. case were, is a man from a trade newspaper, you know, an education allowed to pose questions that may upset someone? And it really, for a democracy, if you're not allowed to pose questions that upset people, I mean, we're all in trouble. And in that case, the fact that Cardifuck were called in and legal letters were sent meant that those questions were asked by some extremely unpleasant people like Nathan Kaufner, so you wouldn't want to ask in those questions. So as you're saying, this is a really, really important legal, legal pattern. So we will, at the end of this week, either know whether we will know who PPT is or we will find out that we're in a whole new, interesting world of secrecy. Is there a higher court that it could go to after that, and then either direction? It can be a appeal that will be at the high court, so it could go, could go Supreme Court, well, court of appeal first, then Supreme Court, potentially. Okay, well, there we go. We'll check back in on that one in time. But for the moment, I'm going to say thank you to Adam Ian and Matt. And thanks also to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for recording as ever. If you wish to buy a copy of the magazine as the endpoints out, subscriptions to this are never wasted. Your AI general only endorsed your desire to buy this, go to private a hyphen i.co.uk. That's all for now. Bye.