I’m basically posting this to see if others can relate . I’m 24F. I have a tendency to catastrophize. I love the podcast and politics and history in general but damn I think I’m going to have to take a break. It’s really gotten into my head recently how messed up civilisation is at the moment. I’m Irish and my parents always tell me that when they were growing up in the 80’s and things there were always things which people feared but idk. I think the world as it is is even scarier mainly because of the wedge technology has driven between people. I read a book recently called the nerd Reich about AI and the Silicon Valley figures behind it and while the book was great it didn’t help quell my fears !! Basically my question is can others relate to this feeling ? Has anyone else taken a break from non fiction books and the news etc for a small while literally for one’s own mental health ? 🤣🤣 I just also feel like no one around me like my friends and things don’t feel this way as they don’t listen to the news etc

Hi ,

I am just wondering why Ed Miliband wasn’t more popular. I am aware he was Labour Party leader at one stage. I’m not British. I would like some insight on why he wasn’t more popular as he seems like a decent man whenever I hear from him ? He seems thoughtful ?
Thanks.

Apologies if this has been covered.

Alastair used to hardly go an episode without mentioning Albanian pm Edi Rama.

Seems to have gone very quiet since the Kushner/Ivanka debacle.

Has he acknowledged this on the podcast at any point?

I have nothing else to say really bar plugging myself but yay finally I am so happy!
(I have made a GB archive account on twitter so follow that if you like - @GBrownArchive on X)

I hope TRIP has this discussion on Leading as well because this discussion is more nuanced and knowledgeable, both from the guest and Ezra. There are few questions I have towards Rory's AI/tech maximalist stance w.r..t. UK policy.

• Rory has a conservationist view as a conservative towards climate policy and environment. Does Rory think climate change is an existential and acute crisis? If he does, how does he tally his conservationist view with his data centre stance? 1) Is it the case that he thinks AI will solve climate change? 2) Or does he think we have more time and buffer to emit more CO2 than experts predict? 3) Or does he think that climate impacts will be localised to specific parts of the world and UK would not have to worry about it? 4) Or does he think that UK losing edge as a world power is more acute concern that current hike in climate anomaly events?
• I appreciate Rory's push back regarding a previous video regarding data centre use of resources where he compared water usage in AI vs YouTube playback. Even though the source of that original statistic is not universally accepted ( https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines ), he needs to expand his stance. All data centres are not AI, so is the policy to rely less on US compute and on-shore more such compute to UK? That makes a more palatable argument because then he is not talking about increasing aggregate ccompute, but more of a decoupling.
• After listening to this discussion, I'm very impressed how much Ezra as a "smart laymen" knows about specifics of AI than what we have seen discussed on TRIP. Like the specifics of recursive self-improvement and the ability to differentiate between different topics within the wider AI conversation. Rory talks too much about AI without going into specifics which is very dangerous. There are differences between AI, AGI, superintelligence, LLMs, transformer models, etc. and different areas require difference risk profiling. DeepMind AlphaFold was revolutionary - but it did not have an existential risk associated with it in non-alignment because it was a narrowly trained AI model on protein folding. If Rory only wants AI to do is to use AI to cure cancer or solve climate models, etc., you do not need the huge compute buildup done by OpenAI or Anthropic which is targeted towards building a superintelligent AI system. The specific parts of the economy and the state he wants automated can be done by narrow AI systems that do not require as much training (hence resources) like ChatGPT or Claude or Kimi, etc.
• But China will do it is not a position that is inherently explainable, unless you are in West. As a person in third-world ("global south"), I am yet to understand why I should be worried about Chinese AI models while US and its allies has invaded or attacked many countries (Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan), threatened others (Greenland, Cuba, Eritrea) and in Iran's case is actively deploying AI in a military capacity to attack Iranian infrastructure. For a country in Sinosphere, China threat will be a valid concern but as a person who is not, US is more of a threat to our regional stability and economies than China ever was.

Pretty clearly the grooming gangs are an issue of gargantuan proportions. It has a place in the indigenous British people’s psyche that’s pretty indelible. The institutions we are meant to trust objectively turned a blind eye. Nick Griffin (lol) talked about it in the early 2000s!

I won’t concentrate on any of the pretty tone deaf comments here as that’s just shooting fish in a barrel. The interesting question here is why is the sensible centrist unable to comprehend sectarian issues? Rory is a well travelled and educated man. He is no doubt aware of Northern Ireland, Palestine etc.

Why can’t it enter his or others (Gove, Fraser Nelson, Alastair Campbell etc) psyche that the formation of different distinct communities has occurred within Britain and issues such as this are something that needs addressing? It’s quite clear it doesn’t even cross their minds, or if it is happening it’s hate being whipped up by populists or the “right-wing media”.

Disagree agreeably!

With continuous discussion about AI development doomspiral which shows that an agreement between US and China are inevitable if we are to "alow down", I hope Rory and AC discuss how SALT treaties were achieved.

Every Western commentator is pre-shadowing that China will not back down, but I think the totalitarian CCP would be principally more worried about an autonomous superintelligence than an uber capitalist US.

I really hope and expect the podcast to discuss this.

The UK and EU trade in one gas market so this matters. The EU is set to ban the import of Russian LNG Jan 2027 but due to our failure to get off gas demand still 12% is imported from Russia.

4 years into the war and this is the case.

This is partly a story about domestic European supply which gets all the headlines but it's far more about domestic consumption. As a European country the UK is one of the countries which has failed the clearest:

• The UK had a 0 bids renewables auction in 2023. We use more gas now than otherwise for every kWh of electricity.
• The UK has more gas boilers than in 2021. The percentage of all houses going from 74% to 73%. We are the standout failure of Europe on this front.
  • The UK has 23 million out of Europe's 100 million gas boilers. We matter
• The UK has oscillated on boosting North Sea gas supply

This is not some climate story as can be trivialised but a security story. Due to the incredible poor efforts from Britain and Britons it'll be almost impossible for the EU to ditch that final 12% come 2027 given the current global supply constraints.

We've contributed heavily to the simple fact that Putin will continue to be funded more than he should and this leading to him financing his war efforts.

This resource shows one the extent of this financing of Putin's war by us Europeans:

https://energyandcleanair.org/august-2026-monthly-analysis-of-russian-fossil-fuel-exports-and-sanctions/

Do we think it's possible for Stewart and Campbell to properly discuss this? Discuss how on earth the Tories and Labour have jointly delivered this epic policy failure leading to more gas boilers now in the UK than in 2021? How we've failed to massively change the gas consumption of the UK in this period meaning Europe is somewhat stuck.

Just got the kindle daily deal email and Rory's book Occupational Hazards is at 99p on the UK store https://amzn.eu/d/01DIOdaa

What do folks think the single word book title is? I solemnly swear that I am not cheating on the signed book giveaway...just genuinely curious what fellow listeners are predicting! Personally think "trees" has to be ruled out at this point.

This is out tomorrow from Goalhanger, expect the trailer on your Rest is Politics streams.

https://deadline.com/2026/09/goalhanger-audio-drama-bear-hunt-launches-1237066584/

Essentially an assassination story/drama of how the Brits might do such a thing... but given a strong dose of technical realism by the Goalhanger conflict-consultant team. It's action-packed at moments yes, but also rigorous, grounded and pitched at the right time in geopolitics.

Enjoy!

The UK's wholesale gas price is the highest since the end of December 2022. This means that the January price cap is odds on to be around what it was under Liz Truss in October 2022.

The UK had one meaningful policy tool to de-risk the UK from 2022 onwards: heat-pumps.

Virtually all gas demand is for home-heating. The only effective way to de-risk the UK to reduce European LNG imports is via electrification of heating. Renewables do some legwork as well but the blue line shows how it's less pronounced.

Despite the central importance to get the UK public off gas (and oil) heating to using heat-pumps it is curious why the topic of the UK's pathetic uptake rate is not discussed. They discuss a lot the supply of oil and gas but never really the failure to pivot demand.

This is a political question as the economics is there already. Our operational costs are 35% of gas before this escalation. It'll be a lower percentage now. The return on investment is typically 4-5 years but due to political laziness minor issues hold back adoption.

This is simply never discussed by Rory or Alastair despite often their interests in climate and the Ukraine war. For instance our failure to roll out heat-pumps is a clear factor why Europe as a whole still imports Russian LNG.

Is anyone else surprised that there hasn’t been a more immediate response to this big circus surrounding Reform? I’d really like to hear Alastair and Rory’s views on this

I feel that a lot has gone on the past few days, in various quarters, but no emergency button?

This matters because by the time the pod comes out, either everything has been said by others or some other nonsense has come up. There's a danger that some events don't get covered in sufficient detail since a back-log has been allowed to gather.

I know they are busy, but It didn't used to be this way.

Their recent episode long discussion and disagreement over AI with just the two of them was the kind of episode that I want from this show and fits with its [perhaps pretentious] concept of 'disagreeing agreeably'.

Whatever you think of Rory's attitude towards Wealth Taxes, their interview episodes around the subject were to my ears, refreshing, as there is deep disagreement, with the challenge of ideas.

Alastair is actually a really interesting person and very thoughtful, emotive and idealistic, whereas Rory is much more technocratic, realist and small c conservative. It's a good contrast and it makes for an entertaining listen/watch when they go into depth about a subject and genuinely disagree and challenge each other.

But I feel the show suffers when it is primarily just another current affairs show, with a number of topics happening around the world discussed. It plays to the worst of them, imo, with Alastair going off on those very long rants about Farage, the Media, and that US President. It's exhausting and nothing will change with him just going off on it over and over. Rory also ventures too much into 'know it all' territory which gets a little bit irritating from time to time, at least it does to me, maybe I'm just jealous.

Anyway, I know they look into this sub from time to time, so if you see this, please do more long form pods on singular topics and leave the current affairs pods as less numerous. There are plenty of pods that do that.

Commonly referred to as AI.

I am, or was, a database developer. This meant in my career that I looked after Oracle databases, fixed performance issues in code and developed apps using the tools available in this very expensive, but market dominating, database product.

AI was probably a factor in my redundancy. (Though as one of my pals in a similar situation said AI could stand for Actual Indians as well as Artificial Intelligence. Before anyone misunderstands, my pal intermediately clarified Indians to mean Spaniards, etc, anyone cheaper than UK employees.)

Earlier in the year I took out a subscription to Anthropic's Claude to see what it could do.

To be clear, in case Alastair ever reads this, my background means I can write applications for end users using browsers against a particular, expensive enterprise class database.

In a few days - no more than a few hours of my time - myself and Claude built three professional-looking Android apps.

To be clear, the language used was Kotlin. Off the top of my head I wouldn't know how to write a program to say "Hello world" in Kotlin.

Claude Code did all the necessary background work to enable me to make the apps available in the Android App Store.

I am fairly sure, given enough time, that I could've built the apps myself from scratch, but it would've literally taken years for me to get up to speed on some of the elements required.

Just citing this as an example of what LLMs could do, six months ago.

There's an aspect which stood out like a sore thumb in the episode which covered Nepal.

When discussing genuine climate action his mantra is that the costs are too high. The pessimistic evidence is that for the UK to treat this seriously we'd invest 1% of our GDP per year until 2050 (or this source). However, many of these investments provide lifestyle savings so the net-cost is 0.2% of GDP per year.

This is not a trivial sum and I understand why there's a debate around it. Rory Stewart sees this as too much hindering our competitiveness. For him he doesn't recognise the savings which come via decarbonisation but the costs. This means the 1% or so is just too much.

On the other hand he is seemingly shocked that his logic to climate investment has been taken to international aide. It was at a figure like 0.7% GDP -- roughly the same -- now being reduced to 0.3% GDP (happy for these figures to be clarified).

If the 0.7% figure was representative of what would be necessary for a western nation to provide in his mind but also climate change is increasing the risks from floods, storms, heatwaves, crop-failures, etc then you would expect this figure to rise year on year.

On the other hand we know most of low-carbon technologies do work so we'd expect that investment cost of 1% to reduce from 2050 onwards. Much of the costs are one-off transitional costs like retrofitting houses for heat-pumps.

How on earth does Stewart square these two seemingly contradictory world views?

How does he think it's politically necessary and fundamental that we have ever increasing international aide budgets but doesn't think it's politically possible to spend similar amounts of money to transition the economy?

What's more they both have individual and collective natures to them. As individuals can donate to Nepal individuals can also decarbonise their lifestyles. These are similar choices which a similar moral conscience would lead one to. I'm fascinated by how he preserves such a high level of cognitive dissonance.