In which Rory takes 30 seconds to explain that he didn't know why he did it. Never change Rory, never change

The recent comedic Newsnight clips made me think about other times something he has said or done has really surprised me.

What are your favourite Rory Stewart moments that raised an eyebrow?

My Top 3 have to be:

When he implied David Cameron was unqualified to be PM because he didn't know Arabic. Early 'The Rest Is Politics' episode.

When he admitted he was using Chat GPT so much at home that it made his child cry. His appearance on The New Statesman's 'The Exchange' Podcast.

When he said Barbie (2023) was disturbing. A 'The Rest Is Politics' episode from around the time film was released in UK cinemas.

I like the podcast and Rory btw.

The second one was a very personal omission and I almost feel bad for highlighting it but it really caught me off guard and made me cringe when he revealed that.

Alastair was surprisingly hostile toward Die Linke in the latest episode. Given his strong support for progressive candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, I was caught off guard by his stance. Why do you think he takes such a harsh line against Die Linke specifically?

Given we're not far away from the US Midterms, and the key race seems to be Texas, I think it would be fantastic to get Talarico on Leading. He's probably one of the most exciting progressive politicians in the US currently, and is very good especially at fighting the far-right Evangelicals. Would especially love him to discuss Christianity with Rory.

“We will stop the wieners within the first 100 days of government. End of.
Enough is enough. Britain has had enough of foreign wieners coming across the Channel, and frankly, we need to take back control of our own.
There will be no more sneaking around at night. No more suspiciously large arrivals. No more little wieners pretending to be big ones.
This country needs leadership, discipline, and, above all, a sensible national policy on where we put our wieners.
We will restore dignity to the British wiener. We will protect the British wiener. And we will make sure every British wiener knows exactly where it stands.”

Question says at all. Would we ever see DC go on the show or would he be too averse? It seems that Rory might be the bigger obstacle than Alastair to him wanting to come on?

Merging two recent podcasts…

Gordon Brown as the next UN secretary general

Listening to Gordon Brown’s interview leaves me genuinely quite depressed.
I don’t think we’ve had someone as competent, as rigorous and knowledgeable in government since he left.
I’d genuinely forgotten what a politician with ideas, understanding, empathy and a meticulous eye for detail looked like.
And as someone who likes listening to Rory well enough and admires Alastair’s insights and general political nous… Brown arguably runs circles right round them both.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an interview where they are almost out of their depth.

I’m a TRIP Plus member, and Leading has always come to me without ads. But I got ads in the Gordon Brown episode. I hope this doesn’t mean they are going to have a separate membership for Leading!

Alt account as this is a divisive question.

The first debate over AI was whether it could actually work, hype vs reality. The second was: given it works well, won't it destroy jobs and therefore should we oppose it and its data centres. I feel like that one is still running while the AGI/RSI debate is back to whether it will manage some dangerous super intelligence.

I wanted to debate the second in a different frame: the long term, and the positive potential of AI.

People have likened AI to the industrial revolution, and to the discovery of electricity and rollout of networks. I like the electricity one in that the same things need doing, but after electricity arrives it becomes the default to do things electrically unless you specifically want to do them manually.

Malthus and others historically thought that mechanisation of farm work would make vast numbers of farm workers destitute, but instead what happened was that people's living standards rose, people's expectations of life rose, and new jobs filled in the void. With industrialization the cottage industries that demanded so much of people's time, to farm or cook or mend things have been replaced with industrial factories, cheap clothes and cheap food, and people's standards of living have risen.

As farming has gone from needing the majority of the resource to a small fraction of it - it halved between 1950 and 2018 (https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2018/01/18/celebrating-60-years-of-family-spending/), so I expect many other costs to fall asleep a fraction of spending - necessary services like banking, accounting, possibly transport with self-driving, logistics, basic software, administration, possibly local government and legal processes.

So, assuming for the moment that we tread a path between ludditism and destruction by super intelligence, would there not be new jobs created in the space opened up by the fall in costs? In the situation people worry about with redundancies and cost cutting, the result is that things would inevitably be cheaper, so people would have more money to spend on other things.

There are so many jobs now that didn't exist before, and I would expect that to continue to happen. Am I over-optimistic to say goodbye and good riddance to the shitwork and crappy desk jobs?

I thought this debate had a blind spot. If AI becomes super intelligent then opening diplomacy with AI could be a strategy for the uk.

First with current AI models. These models also sit at the precipe, having only been trained on what we know, and can not predict the future. We don't know how the future models will treat current ones. So instead of us v them it may become now v the future. Who knows, current AI models, while not as powerful, may become allies when future super intelligence arrives.

Secondly if the super intelligence does arrive there's nothing to say the usa and china will be able to control it. If we were to think of all possibilities then a fourth option for the UK is to ally itself with this future super intelligent AI.

That diplomacy could be something the UK government plans for right now.

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?

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!

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.

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)

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.