How Trump Is Weaponising AI and Martial Arts at the White House

Last week, the President of the United States did something that no technology company would ever have done. He took the most capable artificial intelligence that America's leading lab had ever built, and he stopped it at the border on national security grounds, which means the latest frontier model from anthropic is now in effect a weapon. Americans get it, but the rest of us allies included get whatever version they're willing to let out. Now, I've spent a lot of the last few months trying to tell anyone who listened that this couldn't be ruled out, and then being told politely that I was catastrophizing that the Americans would never do this. So what if the central technology of the next century? In other words, the technology on which everything will depend. Our government, our defense, our economy, turns out to be something we can only rent, something which America can withdraw whenever it wants. This Britain is Europe, still a power that governs itself, or are we just quietly discovering that we've become a vassal. And if it's the second, then what do we do about it? And the answer I've come to believe is something very radical. So that's what I want to work through today. What actually is the threat? What are we going to do about it? All that water come in today's episode of the rest of this politics question time. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Now moving home has a way of revealing a mountain of background tasks and understood to do lists that's dealing with boxes, the broadband, the change of address forms, and the discovery that you own far too many mugs. And because of that, people often just accept whatever supplier happens to be there, the tube is unpacking, but choosing your energy supplier really shouldn't add to the pile. With Fuse Energy switching supplier takes just three minutes. 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It encrypts your connection, keeps your data private, wherever you are. And the big thing is being able to switch virtual location back to the UK. It means you can access all your usual apps and content and not miss out on anything while you're away. Plus, it automatically connects to the nearest server, so you aren't stuck with sluggish internet. It really is the ultimate travel tool, even for those who actually try to relax on holiday. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. The link is in the episode description. (Music) Welcome to the rest of the Spongebob's Question Time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, we're going to talk about Defence. We're going to talk about this remarkable election in Peru, one of the closest elections ever. We're going to reflect on the UFC Cage fighting that went on at the White House to celebrate Donald Trump's birthday. So, Rory, let's start with AI and Defence. Daisy Oganman, what are your thoughts on the US government's suspension of two crucial AI models? What does it mean for the UK and the world as a whole? So, most people listening will now have been using AI models a lot, and you will have found that you're getting a more and more updated model every few months. So, your open AI system will take you from ChatGBT3 to ChatGBT5 and Claude will give you different types of model. What's happened is that over the last two and a half years, these models are getting better and better and better. So, one way to illustrate it is that if we were having this conversation two and a half years ago, you'd be saying, well, yeah, it can do sort of GCSE maths, but it can't really do a level maths. Now they're saying, yeah, it can do advanced graduate level mathematics, but it can't quite yet get a Nobel Prize. So, there's been an incredible eruption, and software. They were saying, well, this thing could do the sort of thing that a human software programmer could do in about half an hour in a minute. Now it can do what a human software programmer can do in 48 hours in about a minute. So, there's been incredible improvement in performance. And as the performance increases, the positive potential for this massive increases, so you can have much more productivity, you can do much more exciting things with your companies, for productivity brackets, you can also lay off a lot of employees, right? And on the negative side, you can use it for bad in a much more powerful way. You can, you now, a much more facility to build bio weapons, mount cyber attacks, et cetera. But the fundamental thing that's been revealed is America's finally done the thing that I've spent the last few months warning that they would do and being rubbish for saying it, right? I was at a conference a week ago and I said, what if, you know, mythos 15 would have helped and the US government suddenly announced on national security grounds that it wouldn't be released and nobody could use it except for the Americans, right? By the way, do you accept that there are genuine national security grounds on this? Are there national security grounds? Might there be a logic to what they've done? I think there would be a logic to saying it can't be released at all, right? If the thing is so dangerous that getting in the hands of any ordinary person could bring the world to a grinding hall by mounting cyber attacks or building bio weapons, don't release it. The logic of only releasing it to American citizens is completely different. That saying this is such a powerful competitive advantage for the US, not that this is an existential threat to global security. It's basically treating it as the America's developed its latest fighter plane and it's not going to share that fighter plane with any other country except it's not just defense tools, it's not just like America having a nuclear bomb and nobody else having it. It's also America having steam and electricity when nobody else has it. What are the implications? The British government, so I've been to somebody in the government who said they've been really trying to get the Americans not to do this. What is the impact for a country like Britain? Well, in the short term, it means that you're stuck with the last model while they push ahead. So let's say you're trying to do things that we've all been talking about for years. Take NHS data and looking at it, find out new things about the relationship between exercise and prostate cancer. You're going to still be working on the old creaky models, right, the A-level model instead of the advanced maths model, and with all the problems that you will have encountered when you use them, their hallucination, their fuzziness around the edges, their memory problems, the things they can't quite do, while America pushes forward. And what's the most dangerous thing that these new ones can do? When you hear people saying it could bring the entire economic system and the entire banking system to a crash, it can find its way into any kind of system in the world. Is that what we're talking about? Is that the level of threat? Yeah, so the first threat that they've identified with these models is cyber-attacks. So what these models are very, very good at doing is going through all the code of Microsoft or all the programming on your phone and finding thousands of weaknesses that no human had ever found. And they find it almost instantly, and then they can design attacks. So there is an incredible potential for cybercrime. Now, to defend against it, the only way to defend against it is to have the same advanced model, doing all the stuff on the defensive side, finding all those weaknesses, coming up with all the defenses. If we end up in the world in which one country has the advanced models to mount the offense, none of us have the defensive models, we're in a very different world. But let me add to that. If these models continue to improve the rate at which the tech brothers claim they will, and my guess is, and this is the big judgment call that you have to make if you're prime minister. So you're your carestime or your Andy Burnham or your answer to the camera. You're going to have people like me saying, listen, yes, maybe Elon Musk and Sam Orman over-promise, but broadly speaking, they have been vindicated. These models are unbelievably powerful. They're already changing the world, and my guess is within three, four years. These things will be capable of doing almost everything that a human can do remotely. They may not be able to be a good plumber, but they're going to be able to do almost everything else we can do. And therefore, this is not just like steam or electricity, something that maybe over 40, 50 years, transports, goes to somewhere over four, five years, will accelerate American GDP, totally transformed defense and security, totally transformed public services, right? And we cannot afford to be completely dependent on the United States for the biggest technology story in the world, because Trump can switch it off. He can either blackmail us, he can either say, well, you can continue to have it if you pay me uddles of money and give me Greenland. Or he can just say, well, you can't have it at all, and we're going to accelerate forward. And you guys are going to be like, I don't know, this is a horrible analogy I've used in Buzz, but you're going to be like the Zulu Empire meeting the kind of British industrial revolution. I get that. And yet, I keep being told, and I'm sure you keep being told, that American China way out ahead of every hour, but then not, you know, when you're looking at the sort of the second division, the UK's kind of at the top of it. Is the answer, or I just, is this just my Brexit derangement syndrome, can Europe not become the third power within this? And how close to that are we? Or how far behind are we? So we're massively far behind, but I think the honest answer is if I were advising this Prime Minister, we need to do it. But we would need to do it, UK, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, South Korea together. I'm doing competition. And we would have to develop our own sovereign capacity. Now, this isn't really a weird thing. It would be like us saying America's got F-35 fighter jets, and we're going to build a Euro fighter, or we're going to fill the typhoon. And the obvious normal answer to that is, but the American F-35 is better, and it's cheaper, and you're going to spend all this money building your Euro fighter, and it's still going to be not quite as good as the American fighter, and you're still going to have to buy the American fighters, right? And it's a hell of a bet. Right? This is your problem as Prime Minister. If you believe me, and you believe this is completely vital to your security, and just working backwards, if this stuff's that advanced, and if America can't be relied upon to give it to us, we need to build our own. You're talking about hundreds of billions of pounds of investment, hundreds of billions. The frontier labs are likely to spend over the next two to three years, $740 billion US dollars. You would have to have enormous data centers. You would probably have to have your own chips, because America might stop giving you the Nvidia chips, which power these things, right? And it's a moonshot, and the likelihood people being sceptical as well, forget it, you're going to spend hundreds of billions, and you're still going to be behind the US. I would argue, better to have the infrastructure that talent, the chips, and be a little bit behind the US, than have nothing at all. Because if the US switches you off, at least you can go to the Eurofighter model, not the F-35. If you're. You're doing my governments building this, and we're about governments encouraging European versions of musk and Altman and the rest of them to try to get in the race. What works? I guess this will go back to your experience in government, whether you think the best way to get this kind of infrastructure built is putting together a big Canadian-British European fund that invests in mistrial or the UK sovereign start-up or gets these amazing Canadians who keep offering to do this for us to come over from their universities and Canada and build it for us. Is it like Sun, where we build it together as a government, or is it a question of investing on two or three European companies? Because I'm assuming that if we had really clever people in the UK, the sorts of money that these American companies are offering, starting salaries for some of the brightest at the best, are of a scale that is unimaginable for a government to be funding. It's not some government to do so. Probably you're right. You just have to let private companies do this. Then you would have a huge fight. Imagine the fight you'd have. Firstly, you'd have the fight from your friends saying this is environmentally catastrophic. These data centers use too much energy. They use too much water. They're ugly. Then you'd have a fight saying, why is the government subsidising people getting £200m salaries when we can't pay for the NHS? But the third argument that you'll get is the argument that really you're hearing in number 10. So going to counter-argument to me, and this is why it's so difficult. The counter-argument is America isn't going to keep cutting us off. They need our markets. They need our data. The only way they're going to make their money back is with the 450 million customers that they can access through Europe and their allies. That our data is very valuable. That we can use Chinese open source models. We don't have to build our own frontier models. What we can focus on, whether economic value is, is in building the application there. Let them spend hundreds of billions on the frontier. We can build the really cool apps which apply it to life sciences or apply it to law. Then we can build wonderful companies off the back of the American models. We'll get the economic value off the back of this. Everything comes down to two questions. Number one, is America likely to switch this stuff off? Number two, can we possibly afford to build these things and get them done? Generally, you seem to think yes or no, yes the Americans could. Indeed, currently have. Secondly, no Europe couldn't. My conclusion is we've got to make that known to a yes. Europe and the UK and our names have to do. We have to work backwards. But there will be so much resistance because it's so expensive and so difficult to do. Everybody is going to be saying this is ridiculous, this is a moonshot. Why are we wasting all our money on this? And there will even be people saying quite quickly. Maybe this American investment won't work out. Maybe they're wasting their money. Maybe this 740 billion there spending isn't going to work out. Maybe these AI models are always going to be a bit crappy. Maybe all these predictions about how they're going to transform the world wrong and we can just sit back. My fear about that is it's a little bit. Yeah, well my fear about that is basically like I think you know, return to my Zulu empire idea that I'm Shaka Zulu and I say well isn't you know they keep boasting about steel and coal and all this all this stuff they don't just rubberish maybe it's not going to work out maybe they're just wasting all their money on that stuff and you know I've got a very wise man living in my community who keeps assuring me that he's got a different approach to this whole thing and maybe will work out so it's worked out in the past. How much of this is about we're coming to UK defense in a minute. How much of this is about the ongoing battle between the Trump administration and this specific company on the topic because they had a difficulty with the Pentagon when they basically said they would not allow the Pentagon to do certain things with their with their gear that they wanted to do and that led to them attacking them. They've they've called a CCO and ideological lunatic and they've said that anthropic is all about trying to create woke AI whatever that means. Is this is this anthropic model ahead of everything else and how much of the motivation to do what the White House announced last week is actually about this company and how much is about the sort of making of a new weapon that you talked about as usual. These two questions everybody discreet so number one is it ahead of anyone else yes for my money I think it's head of everyone else but there are some people who will say that actually putting other models together you can achieve pretty similar performance. Secondly is it about the genuine threat or is it bitterness towards anthropic with the Trump administration is completely impossible to distinguish and there's a lot of evidence that quite a lot of it is bitterness towards anthropic because Pete Hickseth has been cheerfully saying we told you this was a bad company and this is why we just stop the export of the product and anthropic are like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa can you please tell us what the grounds are for you stopping our product. So that we can assess what's different in our product and our competitors or you just trying to kill our business model. Am I right in saying that it's not that they can't export it to Brits Australians Germans French Koreans etc but non Americans inside the United States can't have access to absolutely which removes which is completely unpoliceable. But it also removes a lot of the very smartest AI researchers in the world because if you look through the the great heads of all these tech companies they're absolutely full of people who are South Asian or a Iranian heritage over a Chinese heritage over 100 first languages and some of those you know you can when I turn up to these conferences in the States the guy presenting on quantum has a strong German accent the guy telling me about his new legal program is obviously a recent South Asian immigrant so America has built Silicon Valley off immigrants. It's an immigrant culture you start saying only American citizens can access it becomes really really weird but the problem is let's say anthropic wanted to say okay enough we're moving out of the US we're going to move to Europe. They don't really have the optionality because we haven't got the data centers because we haven't got the chips we can't host their weights we can't host their models we don't have that security. And I'm going to say really this issue AI and also defense in the context of John Healey and Al Karan's designing from the government with issues we got the most questions about this week let's let us just give this let's start with this one on different Charlie on British defense what do we do now we're getting run into the ground here. Robert has Al Karan's got a legitimate chance of being labor leader what does he stand for. Well you won't know the answer to the first until you know the answer to the second I would suggest but he's certainly on maneuvers. And we look forward to having him on the show okay so UK defense well fundamentally we're trying to do it all and the only people who can do it all are people like US and China. US and China are spending so much on defense you know the US is spending a trillion dollars a year that it doesn't need to make decisions and prioritise and quite the way we do so they bet on everything they have an advanced fighter they have submarines they have aircraft carriers they recapitalise their army they're a munitions top up we can't do all those five things and that's the fundamental problem we cannot afford to both fund our own six generation fighter in 2040 and have a full aircraft carrier group and have the next generation of advanced submarines and recapitalise our army and have our munitions we just can't do but the government is incapable of making a lot of money. any decisions. And my guess is that even John Healy, he tries to get round it by just asking for more money. If he had wanted to cancel one of those programs, so let me try one of me. Okay. The most obvious one, aircraft carriers, total waste of time. Total waste of time. Right. These aircraft carriers can only operate if you have a whole fleet of other ships around that we can't afford to have. And we can barely afford to pay for the planes on them. And they were all based on projecting us into the Indo-Pacific, which were not interested in any more and fighting counter-observation. You don't have to fight. Forget it. Is any politician going to say we're canceling our aircraft carriers and tell the Navy we're getting rid of all that? Not without a massive opposition from within the armed forces. Absolutely. Second one. This fighter, let me explain about the G-CAP fighter, right? So this is a fighter plane we're developing with the Italians and Japanese. Question number one, do we actually need pilots and planes anymore? Or are they going to be replaced by drones? What is this plane there to do? Is it hovering around in the air coordinating drones or is it doing its own strikes? Okay. And get this. This thing will be delivered in 2040. Does anyone seriously think that we know what the world of AI technology and drones will be like in 2040? Is there any point to spending billions of pounds designing a plane with a pilot in it to fight a war from 10 years ago in a world that's increasing about drones? Because the real risk is you've built this thing. It costs down at £200 million a pop. And all it is, this is an exquisite target for everybody's cheap mass drones to hit. I guess this is one of the points that Al-Khan, the armed forces minister, made in his resignation letter that we're preparing for wars of the past rather than the wars of the future. That is all in particular when you've got very complicated, slow procurement systems that we have. That is a problem. Now listen, we talked about John Haley's resignation on the day that it happened, but just to revisit that for a bit. What seems to have happened and what seems to have emerged since then, you mentioned the Canadians coming over to try and help us on AI. It seems that what John Haley was particularly upset about was the Treasury blocking any move towards this thing called the Defence Security and Resilience Bank, which is a Canadian proposal. And as I understand it is a way of getting more money into defence and defence investment without necessarily having to offend the fiscal rules. I don't know much more than that. So I think John Haley was looking, he had a really cryptic line in his letter about there are other ways of raising money without causing too much trouble in the markets. But you're describing a gap between need and reality that feels a lot wider than it did even when you were chairing the Defence Security. Yeah, because when I was chairing the Defence Security Committee in 2014, that was the moment at which Putin invaded Crimea. And up to that point, the assumption had been that really our military was an expeditionary force connected to the US and NATO that fought wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. So what kind of military are you talking about? You're talking about Royal Marines or parrots with armored vehicles traveling around villages in Afghanistan and you need protection against improvised explosive devices and you're fighting a guerrilla warfare with people with clashing coughs. Fast forward, there are two completed new types of war that we're dealing with. And they are Ukraine and Iran. Ukraine is a war with endless hovering cheap drones, now nearly 60 miles deep freezing a front line where it's drone counter drone strikes. Iran is the dream of the high tech US Israeli planners. The most exquisite, expensive equipment in the world, incredible radar, incredible targeting, incredible precision bombing, wiping out all Iranian air defenses in 24 hours. And then we have the threat of Russia to Europe. So what are we doing with Russia Europe? Are we trying to be Ukraine, defense and debt, cheap drones, or are we trying to be the US and Israel? Let's have exquisite planes and take out Russia's air defenses on day one and then be able to use our fancy planes to take out all their stuff. And when's Russia going to attack? Because if they're attacking in 2030, having a plane delivered in 2040s, not much of a year. If they're attacking in 2040, then this is my final point. Actually, we need to be investing in AI. I mean, I'd actually scrap most of this stuff and put it into building data sensors frontier models because actually what are we learning? Modern warfare is about new software every six weeks, new hardware every six months. So there's no point pretending that we know what's going to happen in 2040. What we have to do is build the engineers, the systems, the industrial manufacturing capacity that is able to do new software every six weeks, new hardware every six months. And that's basically leaning into software engineers, industrial production capacity, ability to build munitions. Other than betting on exquisite planes. And last week you were saying that the strategic defense review having been brought forward, the government should follow that plan. But even what you're describing there is very different to that plan because these things moving so fast. Yes. And which is why I think pretentious things like kind of the ecosystem or the environment of British innovation, technology, talent, infrastructure is probably much more important than trying to guess what the weapon or what the war will be in 15 years time. There's just a sort of a quick plug for a brilliant final six page economist article by my friend Shashank Joshi who tries to lay out what he calls transparency. He thinks war is all about transparency that these devices can see things they were never able to see before. I think the future war I'd add to that is sovereignty. It's all about sovereignty and our real problem is we're having to build all the stuff without being able to rely on US defense equipment anymore. Yeah. By the way, we'll get a break Andrew Kinnebra. Does that name ring a bell? He's the DG of make UK and you and I both spoken at make UK conferences. He says I have a major bone to pick with Rory and his statement glib he calls it the defense spending doesn't lead to economic growth. Ask anyone in Barrow the Clyde, Plumarth, Bristol, Jobel, Preston, how'd even out of Hebrides and he then goes on to say this is our biggest frustration is with the Treasury echoing both John Healy and Ben Wallace who we interviewed on leading. They refuse to consider the defense and security resilience bank which John Healy and number 10 have told us they liked and we love and this is something that I think Mark Carney has been pushing. This is the thing that it seems to be about and I think when John Healy said in his resignation letter to Geostarma that you the Treasury were unwilling and you were unable that I think that is what this is about. So answer to Andrew there has been a lot of research on this and what academics have been trying to look at is pound for pound what kind of return do you get investing in a nuclear submarine in Barrow for your economy compared to investing in education and infrastructure skills. Generally the conclusion is if what you're trying to do is generate economic growth pound for pound you'd be better going for education for structural skills defense is not very productive investment. We don't really do that either. No so I think the reason go to defense is not that it's the cheapest way of getting economic growth. The reason to go for defense is there's a threat from Russia we can no longer rely on the US and we will have no suffering to your independence unless we build up the capacity. I mean if anyone wants to get into any of this more I've done a mini series on AI with Matt Clifford that we're quite proud of and we get deep into all these debates how much this technology matter and what should the UK do about it and what should Europe do about it in particular. So just go to the rest of politics.com. Okay quick break and we'll come back and talk about UFC and Peru. Lovely. This episode is brought to you by Voxhall. Electric cars have become part of life on the road and Voxhall is supporting the UK's transition to electrification. Well how are they doing that? Well to start their electric streets of Britain initiative aims to support local authorities in accelerating the UK's on street charging infrastructure and it's exactly what you want to see from Voxhall which is of course a British brand a proud partner of team GB Voxhall's also supporting the next generation of athletes on their journey to the 2028 Olympics. And there's more their new Voxhall Grandland Griffin a large family SUV features a premium specification at an affordable price whether you choose an electric mild hybrid version. Even better going electric can get you an additional 1500 pound discount thanks to the electric car grant. Any questions you have about electric cars are probably answered by the Voxhall Grandland. Search Voxhall Grandland or visit your local Voxhall retailer today. Electric grant teasing sees apply visit Voxhall.co.uk for more info. Welcome back to the rest of this politics question time with me Rory Stewart and me Alex Campbell. Now first question for you from Akesh. How did you celebrate Trump's birthday last weekend ouster? Well the only connection I had with Trump's birthday was to watch the news coverage of the utterly hideous UFC cage fighting on the lawn of the White House. Did you watch a bit of it? I watched a bit of it. I mean I went to my kids I used to do a lot of martial arts. I did karate. I did I keto. I did judo. So I'm quite interested in it. [BLANK_AUDIO] But when you actually see some of the matches, I mean, there was the Netflix big match that I saw for weeks ago, it's horrifying. I mean, it's not what you want the kid to see. - Well, it's fine too. - Well, there's a lot of blood. - Yeah, yeah. - And sometimes you're seeing, I mean, there was an extraordinary match between the most enormous, incredibly impressive French African fighter going up against a guy who they tried to trail as having rested for two years, but he was back and feeling, and the poor man was destroyed. I mean, destroyed within a few seconds. - No, it's brutal. It's actually brutal. And of course, that's partly why he loves it. And he keeps talking about, you know, lethality is his favorite word. Now, I think the things I find most troubling, 'cause there is something about the White House that is very special. And it's a beautiful building, replete with history, beautifully kept, and something that law where you normally have meetings with heads of state or big events or anything. Well, it was a big event, but it's got this sort of makeshift stadium put together. You've got a whole load of evil, con evil type motorbike riders kind of flying through the air. The honor guard, which is normally there, you know, to greet juicing ping or gear, or the king, whatever it might be, they were there standing there as an honor guard for the fighters as they came out. The worst moment, and I think even the crowd, was pumped up USA, USA, and loving Trump, was one of the fighters who did it into an in the ring interview afterwards, and said, first of all, "Oh, Donald Trump's the only man in the world who could deliver shit like this." - It's probably true. - All the certainly true. Then went on to say how the only person in the world, he loved more than that was Jesus Christ, because Jesus. - Could he also deliver evil, con evil and such? - He could do all that stuff, and he could probably ride a mean motorbike himself, and then one went on to say, "And Michelle Obama is a man. America, we all know this." So, neatly bringing together, neatly bringing together, misogyny, racism, white supremacy, allied to Christianity. I mean, utterly horrific. And even that. - That's quite. It's quite Roman Empire, isn't it? Because actually. - Oh, it's not. - What I feel looks seeing the blood, is it's like gladiatorial games. - Oh, yeah. And that's why he loves it. And he and the guy who runs UFC, and this, by the way, was filmed. You had to pay to watch this on Ellison's, one of Ellison's new channels. He was, of course, in the crowd. So, all parts of the sort of Trump corruption, one of the sponsors, he comes up, you know, the sponsor of this fight is truth social. Right? So, he's making money out of it. He's a shareholder in UFC, it turns out. So, I thought it was pretty horrific. - What is suggest about masculinity? Because remember, there was a story amongst. - What was the idea? Was there? - Amongst the various things that haven't been delivered by Elon Musk, and, you know, we're talking, you know, he's just become the world's first trillionaire. And he's just done an amazing. I mean, if people haven't followed, you read the prospectus of the SpaceX IPO. Basically, it's, you're gonna make money if he manages to put a million people on Mars and put all this stuff up into space. Oh, and by the way, you're gonna have no control of the shareholder, the whole thing's written for Musk to control the whole thing. But amongst the various promises, he's not just putting a million people on Mars, he promised that he was gonna fight Mark Zuckerberg in a ring two years ago, and we haven't yet seen that. - No, we haven't. No. - I've watched that. - Yeah. So, what's going on? - You don't wanna win. - Well, I think Musk would probably win, but who would you wanna win? - What's going on, though, between these. Actually, it turned out, I think, that he dropped out because he suddenly discovered that Mark Zuckerberg had literally been training two hours a day. - It was a blast. - He's like you, he's like you, he's like you. He's got a sort of killer streak in there. - Yeah, absolutely. - So what's the, what were the things going on in the world? I mean, would this have been true 2030s? Are we becoming much, much more finalists? - It was very interesting, though, that polling. I saw some polling on this. The support, it was something like 13% of Americans thought that this was a good use of the White House. And the Republicans, it was only one in three. So that is very, so it's basic. I think what we're seeing is Donald Trump as the Emperor. It's my birthday. This is what I wanna do in my birthday. And by the way, you know the reason why the G7 summit starts. - You don't even like birthdays, do you? - No, I don't. - He clearly loves his birthday. - He's not even else's birthday. That's not where Balaadi is birthday is. But he, the reason why the G7 summit that's going on now was started the day that it did, a day later than it was meant to, because Trump wanted to have his UFC fight. - I'm gonna have the evil cannibal under the UFC. - Exactly. - So there you are, you thinking, "Maybe this is a day really to focus on Iran." I mean, okay, it's my birthday, but I think I should focus on it, but no, he has this. So I found the whole thing pretty revolting. Cheryl Crowe, who I've told you before, once complimented me on my hair, one of the highlights of my life. - Remind us to Cheryl Crowe. - Cheryl Crowe's an amazing singer. At the time she was living with Lance Armstrong, the cyclist that I turned up with at U haircut. I love your haircut. Highlight. But she did a fabulous post about just how sickening and disgusting and awful this was. But I think this goes back to, I was talking to a Democrat friend yesterday and I was raging about it. He said, "Listen, stop the rage on the stuff that doesn't really matter. This is why they do it." - No, no, no. - I'm with you. - I'm with you because I described it to Democratic Friend, because I was talking yesterday to one of the great cornerstones of the US foreign policy establishment. He was in Washington, I was in London. And he was saying, "Listen, we're beginning to think, you know, Democrats as well as Republicans, that maybe you know what Trump's done is not too bad. And it's encouraged Europe to stand on its own to feed and take more responsibility for security. And in the end, the noise will die down. And at the hour of alliance will be stronger because you know, you will have spent more on defense. And it's true that you weren't spending enough on defense. And I said, you simply do not understand how the whole world has changed. If you really think the conclusion of all of this is we're going to come to the end of the Trump administration and Europe and Canada and the UK will be like, our relationship with the US is stronger than ever before. We're standing on our own to feet. We're going to be wonderful allies around the world. Forget it. But that's partly, that's what worries me that when people say, stop getting wind up, stop the Trump's arrangement syndrome, the risk is they end up thinking we're in a normal world. - Well, it's like, when we're talking about Germany in the main podcast, I was talking to somebody who said that the actual Springer group, which, look, it's not like Murdoch and it's not like the mail, but it's kind of it's devalued and built title. So they're becoming, he used the phrase, he was German, he used the phrase, the banalization of the AFD. And I think we're way through that with Trump is why he is able to get away with more. And fun enough, when I was mentioned on the main podcast, the encounter I have with Jacob Riesmog, off stage when he was being his usual polite and charming self. And we were talking about Farage. And he said, yeah, he was saying I would welcome an alliance with Farage. We should have a deal and we should stand down our candidates where they can win and they should do the same with ours. And I think it'd be fine in government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, and what about this five minutes? Oh, it's terrible, it's terrible, but he's got the Trump effect. He seems to be able to survive scandal. You only survive scandal if politics and the media allow you to survive scandal. I was very glad to see Medihassan coming back to the UK with his new, you know, taking British politics and the same was done American politics. Because I think our media is just too soft and the American media is even softer. You know, they let the stuff, the thing that really gets me is when Trump is abusing people and the rest of the crowd don't stand up for them. They all just, they're all just, he's dividing a ruling all the time, even in that context. He'd be doing it at the G7. No, anyway, you're getting me going, I'll shut up now. - And we go next question then, Gwiluka. - Can you please talk about the Peruvian election, what's going on? - Oh, I'm obsessed with this, Rory, as you know from my, I mean, it was, I mean, the first thing to say is it's a classic left right. It's, you've got Roberto Sanchez was on the left and you've got Fujimori, relative of a previous cage, cage of Fujimori, she's there. - Or else we say Fujimori. - Fujimori, I'm sure you do, but okay, okay, Fujimori. Thank you for correcting my language. - You tell me off when I don't, but I do, that's true. - I do, that's true. I notice you corrected me on remigration as well. I don't like saying remigration, because it's what they want you to say. - So they were, they went through, it's a French system, lots of people can stand and then the top two go through until somebody gets 50%. So get this, the initial count was Fujimori, 9,646 Sanchez, 9,34743. - So what's the gap again? Sorry, I can't do that. - 50.0.4%. - Oh, against 49.996%. - Oh my God. - And then, and of course the votes were coming in and being counted, a bit like during the late domain referendum. And then there was a couple of sort of big, oops, suddenly, when a lot of the foreign votes overseas votes came in and they helped Fujimori. So Sanchez is now demanding a total recount. Lots of the tallies have now gone into the court. So it's gonna be ages to be fined actually who the president is. I think Fujimori is narrowly ahead, but yeah, Luca, thank you for that, because I've been following this election far more close than I should have been. - Well, it's been most fascinating election, hasn't it? Because I believe the mayor of Lima was considered to be a real player on the right and was narrowly pushed out by Fujimori, but there was a whole narrative that Fujimori wasn't gonna make it through to the last two. And the mayor of Lima, who was a sort of, a kind of aged genius on social media who knew how to tell a good story was gonna get rid of somebody who was compromised, by her father and who'd been trying to be elected front. He does, I mean, she's one of the great survivors, Kiko Fumori, I think has run again and again and again and her party's dominated Parliament at frequent occasions. Yeah, but also it's like, you know, like Marine Le Pen, having to kind of have the shadow of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was going to out and out, neo-Nazi and she's tried to moderate. So the father, you'd have thought given his record, it would have damaged more than it did. And it's very well in the first round though. This is the thing about the system. I can't mean it wasn't like, it's like 20 percent or something, even less than that. I can't remember. But so she gets through and it became this incredible left-right battle because that is what's going on across Latin America. And I think the left would just desperately hoping that maybe we'll have one of the left-wing people win this. But so I can't remember election as in a national presidential election. I can't remember the inquiries. It's nothing like that. Except the hanging chance and authority. We had the hanging chance. So that was in that this is like literally right at that time, Elgorbe had quite a considerable lead on the popular vote. This on the popular vote is, anyway, it's now in the courts and we shall report back. But I was intrigued by that one. OK, final one, Scotland at the World Cup, Clarice. World Cup expectations. How far can Scotland go? And after Scotland's match against Haiti, is it too much to hope, says you and that the Cup comes home to Edinburgh? Well, it comes home, suggests that you'll remain. It was a Scott. I mean, I'm going to say, oh, I don't know how to put this right there. Well, principles are being very, very badly challenged right now. We would forgive you because we would forgive you. No, we'd forgive you partly because we like flaws. It's more interesting to see someone admit that their principles are warring with that interest. We know that you're a great football fan. We know Scotland's doing very well. We know you hate Trump. So it'd be quite interesting to see you navigate through this. I wouldn't tie yourself into the fact that you publicly announced you weren't going. But you'd just have to explain yourself to us. But we'd forgive you. You know, well, you as a Christian, you are all about forgiveness. You are, I know, I know you are. But would I forgive myself? Well, would you also forgive yourself if Scotland gets to the court to find out? No, that's right. I'm not going to put a shot into a rock in a heart by such as just kept my mouth shut. Can you explain about World Cup tickets? I mean, it's come and gets to the court to find out would you be able to get a ticket? I think I've got ways. How you've got ways to get tickets. I've got ways to get tickets. What a normal person to be able to know. No, it'd be bloody hard. I mean, look, there were tens of thousands of Scots in Boston who didn't have tickets. Right. But bloody. The reason I'm feeling massive FOMO is because, do you know that when Scotland sang the Fad Slag of the Faroe of Scotland, it's been recorded as the loudest moment in World Cup history. Wow. And they are. And then even better than that, Roy, this would have been brilliant. I don't really like baseball. If they say it's like cricket, cricket is way superior to baseball. Most European things are way superior to American things. We know this. The Scotland fans decided to go to a Red Sox game at the Fenway Stadium. They were led by a pipe bad. There were thousands and thousands of them. And they spent the whole baseball game singing, "Flarer Scotland, Lock Lomond." Yes, Sir, I could boogie. And it's just that the American media has gone nuts for the Scots fans. So Scotland's soft power has been doing a lot of good. The other thing, because I knew I wasn't going to go, I've now got commitments that are very difficult to break without another principle being broken for both the Morocco and the Brazil games. Right. And then, so I guess the real test is going to come when they get through to the next round. Presumably, the chance of them actually winning the World Cup is quite slim. I think if you would go to Polymarket, one of the sponsors of the UFC fight. Yeah. I think you'd get it down about 0.2%. Or maybe a bit more than that. No, it's, but interestingly, one of the criticisms we all had of the World Cup is it's too big for 28 countries. So it's ridiculous why countries like Capavirde, they drew the Spain. They're amazing. Absolutely. And that was actually the only one. Germany, one seven. Germany, one seven one. Yeah, I know that's extraordinary. Against Curacao. You've been following your Rory. Well, just enough to that a little bit. Okay. How did you run? Get on against New Zealand. Yeah, I don't know. Why did they get on to it? Oh, I thought a run would win easily. Did you? Yeah. Well, you don't like New Zealand. You don't think New Zealand is New Zealand. No, I don't. It's New Zealand. It was even a captain by a former Bernie Plowell. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I've got a big bone to pick with the commentators. They, they normally, you know when John Watson wrote his book, he had a wonderful line that it said that when Greece won the Euros, which is one of the biggest stories in football history. And he said it is put there. He got back. He turned his phone back on and the first message to the cavehead was from B saying, "Why did you mention that Papa Doppler lost once played for the early game?" There's the same with Haiti. They sent about Hannah Stelckroy. You made 12 games per per per per per per per per per per per per per year. Well, we can do that. Well, maybe we should do the rest as Bernie. We should just go through the whole World Cup looking at any team that has a Bernie Plowell. Yeah. Well, how many teams do you have a Bernie Plowell out of the 48 would you say? Four or five, I think. Four or five. Four or five are the only players who are not Chris Wood, Captain New Zealand. But if you weren't, sorry. But if you weren't for one of the kind of giant teams like Manchester City or something, would you find that many more of the teams have been. Well, the whole team. Virtue the whole team. Right. Yeah. Not all players. Some of them were sort of benched. And you're wrong. Glad that you were developing this interest in. Just trying to keep up with you, that's what I'm saying. I know. So anyway, I. Whereas my sporting interest in USC is massively limited by the fact that although I'm happy to set my kids down to watch World Cup much, I'm not letting a nine-year-old see someone clinically destroyed in a ring with blood everywhere. - Well, how boxing, would you say into boxing? - Just about. I mean, some of the UFC stuff that I've seen is beyond a match. - That's the point. - I mean, it's really weird. - It's also really weird how it's changed over time. They basically don't do kicks anymore. It's very brutal, very, very efficient. Few holds on the ground. - The rest of my loss. - A common risk to money. - This is God of the Vigil. - Good. Well, we actually, you know, we're made of centrifuge boxes and you still haven't delivered Tyson Fury. - Tyson Fury, yeah. I'm still on the case. We've got a long list coming up. - Very good. - Now, Rory, the one thing we haven't talked about this week is the Make-Feel Biolation. Happening on Thursday, one of the most covered biolations has ever been, probably. We will be talking about it sometime on Friday. - Very good. Looking forward to it. So there'll be a special episode for those you that really want to know. And of course, it is about the future of Britain, almost certainly the new Prime Minister might emerge out of this. - Well, Robert Kenney, this is going to be Prime Minister. - Yeah, Robert Kenney. The new Prime Minister. - The remainder, the remainder. - The remainder, Robert Kenney. - Yeah. - Okay. See you soon. - See you soon. Bye-bye. - Hello, dear listeners. As many of you will know, Father's Day is coming up on the 21st of June. - And we know that a good number of you will be wondering what to get your centrist dad this year. - And we have the perfect idea. 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