191: Delo Or No Delo

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1:03Get a different 6-inch sub every day for just 499 each, like meatball marinara on Mondays, tuna on Tuesdays, and the BMT on Saturdays. It's a different 6-inch sub every day, packed with protein and your choice of chopped veggies for just 499 each. Or make it a meal with chips and a drink for just $2 more. But hurry, it's only for a limited time and only at Subway. After participating restaurants, prices higher in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii and on third party delivery, add-ons, taxes and fees for delivery additional. Page 94, the private-eye podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the I studio with Ian, his lot, Helen Lewis and Richard Brooks. We've got some good news to discuss today and I think it's important to start sometimes with positive news because we often talk about negative stories and we talk about corruption and I think it's important that we say when something's gone right. So we're here to cover an amazing act of generosity in British political life which is that out of complete selflessness as far as I can tell, two billionaires have decided

2:05to give reform UK 72 million quid between them, 36 million each. They're giving it now and they don't want anything in return and I just think we should celebrate that. I think we're very cynical sometimes about politics. Yeah, and that's the end of the podcast. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. Thank you. See you next time. Get a subscription to the magazine which features Nigel Farage on the front. For a different financial scandal and that one, the joke was about him taking £500,000 chicken feed as Boris Johnson would have put it. Richard, you've been covering this for the magazine. Yeah, looking at donations from Ben Dilo. A new name for lots of listeners I think. A big crypto guy at Divery World at University, very clever chap went to work for banks and hedge funds and so on. And then discovered Bitcoin when it started to emerge, made a lot of money from it, set up a Bitcoin derivative or a crypto derivative trading exchange called BitMex where you could

3:05do all sorts of things. Including crime? Well, the people using it could. Yes. It seems. I mean, that is one of the things about cryptocurrencies generally is that if you want to have untraceable money for, say, buying drugs or getting around sanctions, they're quite helpful. So did that cause any problems for our Ben Dilo by any chance? Helen, again, I think that's very cynical. I don't think there's any evidence that there was ever any, any unlawful activity unless Richard, do you have any, is there any evidence of that? It's quite hard to find. In fact, you have to go on the internet and look at the US Department of Justice. Well, hang on. Before you say what they found Richard, I should put Dilo's case. I think that's only fair that we put the case for the defence first. Yeah. So traditional inequality. Yeah. But do, do feel free. Well, look, as Dilo, him, so an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as he put it, I'll quote him directly here. He wrote a piece for the telegraph about why he was making this 36 million pound donation to reform. Despite the fact that we ran an honest shop and never lost a penny of customer funds to a hack or misallocation, a US prosecutor went after us for not keeping sufficient records

4:10on our customers. We got through it and I kept calm and carried on with my philanthropy. Right. Prosecutor came after him. That's like Ronnie Biggs complaining that the police came after him for robbing a train. They did come after him. It seems with good reason and found that he was running what they called here and his co-founders were running what they called an effect on money laundering operation. Because they were essentially adding anybody to come onto their platform, do their trading without any checks. And then they misled the authorities about whether they were making those checks. They, for example, took on people who were from Iran and didn't then decide to ask where hang on a minute, where's your money coming from? So there was a lot of sanctions related violations. Would that conflict with reforms patriotic agenda at all? You're not saying it's slightly traitor-ish, right?

5:10Yes, given they used that word a lot. Yeah. He got convicted, didn't he? Yeah, he fully pleaded guilty and he was fine. He got with 30 months probation and a large fine. And that report is pretty severe. Yeah. You know, the point is that reform now wants to present this as a sort of technical failing. And when all the reports of these donations mention imparcing that he was found not to have followed anti-money laundering rules like it's ticking a few boxes or something. But they're probably between money laundering. It's a very blurry line between not ticking the boxes and just letting crooks come in with dodgy money. To the point in Delo's case where he was actually fiddling the records so that it could happen. The U.S. Department just said that he, the Delo, falsely changed internal tracking information to reflect that customer's country of residence as being other than the United States because that would have triggered regulatory intervention. So he was fiddling the records.

6:12That doesn't feature in any of the accounts of this I've read from nearly any paper broad castor at all. Well, no, but you do have to get to about the fifth paragraph. Part of the justice. Yeah. Delo doesn't mention that in his telegraph essay about it. No. What he says, and again, I'm just going to put the Delo case here, he says, I want a fair fight and a level playing field. I would say if you're giving the six million quid to a posh, you want an unfair fight and a non-level playing field surely. Well, their argument is that Labour gets huge donations from the trade unions, for example. So their argument is this is leveling the playing field because the left gets all this money from other sources and they're just, they're recouping upwards. But the trade unions as I understand it from my sketchy view of history involved lots of individuals giving money rather than one. Yes. And they get to vote on it. Yes. Where the money goes. I mean, of course they generally go one place, but yes, there is. Actually, some sort of democratic. Well, do the conservatives this time actually, guys?

7:14Yeah, you never know. Well, as Delo wrote, I think in that telegraph piece that restricting his donations would be literally as undemocratic as you can get when you look at the scale of it, these sums, if you think democracy involves some sort of semblance of equal influence on the process, I mean, these numbers are just phenomenal. I think in the hold of reform as history since, since Brexit party came reform, Delo and Christopher Harborn, who's a chap who's matching his 36 million, they were given about three quarters of the funds to the party. So they're more or less financially controlled it. Two individuals. Yeah. I think this is your fault, Richard, because in the last issue you wrote a piece saying, well, Harborn's keeping his hand in his pocket at the moment and Delo's coming up with all this money. You just provoked him and Dabbling there in Coutts. Come, how do you feel about that? Yeah, we really are calling the tight gitch of it. No, it seems to it. He said it was competitive, didn't he?

8:15He did. I mean, they want to be the most in favour with Nigel Beas best, most generous chum. Can we put this slightly in the context of reform's recent money troubles? So the reason that Nigel Forages on the front cover of the latest issue of the Mag is not that you have second sight in, is that there was already a huge row that completely overshadowed reforms party conference this year about a channel for sting operation where someone posed as a young, naive, wealthy bloke who wanted to give a lot of money to reform and said, well, my dad's the one who really wants to give it, but he's in America. So maybe, you know, can we find a way around that? Reforms top officers who've been dismissed as contractors by the party ever since they had to step down, reforms top officers said, yes, here are lots of ways that you could donate the money and we can basically get around those rules. But Nigel Farage, who was at the meeting, said he wasn't listening. So that's fine. Which again, as cases for the defence go, is not hugely strong. No. Oh, come now, Ian.

9:15You've been in meetings where you haven't been listening. But we hold that against him. But also, I thought the way that the dodgyness of that money was interesting, which was that they were essentially funding polling, which was designed to be fed to newspapers the times and the telegraph as a kind of neutral, unbiased survey. But it was going to be very, very helpful for making reform appear much, you know, maybe more popular than they were. Yeah, jail partners. Yeah. I just thought we should say the name, absolutely. Yeah. So the fact that it was foreign money was just one part of the problem, wasn't it? Yeah. It was hiding the fact that reform were paying for it and then they made them, they were stupid enough to get it funded by a foreign company. Yeah. At this point, I think we should say that a number of people have said that there's nothing odd about these two donors giving so much money. One of them is Richard Tys. Another one is Robert Generick. And if you're looking for down the line guys who know about donations and legality, you couldn't have picked a better two. I did like hearing that for us to tell Laura Kinsberg, I know more about donations, more than anyone else. And I'd say, I'm not sure you do.

10:16If your party's being investigated by the police over the Channel 4 thing and there's a separate parliamentary investigation over the 5 million quit donation, which is another completely separate matter, although it does have Christopher Harbourn at its heart as well. If I were to investigate for a judge or thinking of prosecuting, I would make a note of that comment for future reference. Yes. Well, I knew full well what the rules were. That might not help in the future. Yes. And I know we shouldn't talk too much about ongoing investigations, but there was one line in the Channel 4 documentary that I thought was extremely significant, which is a scene that's again being shot covertly by this undercover hack. The chief of staff for the party, Dan Jooks says, the American father can give his son, British son money, and it'll get to reform that way, which would be, you know, absolutely against the law. But he says, and I'm quoting here, Dan Jooks says, serious point, donate to us and he donate through his son, the, they donate through their kids, the, and then at this point

11:18the reduction becomes, it's like an episode of Jerry Springer. So many names here are being bleeped out. And I'm quite sure that the police are going to be taking a look at that. And I'm quite sure Channel 4 have those names as well, which they may also want to be looking at. There's just every single story about reforms funding seems to involve dodging this investigations the police now. Well, there's also a drip, drip, drip effect, which is often what makes stories kind of more appealing and run and run, which is in the case of these two new donors, a lot hinges on when they became resident in the UK because of the way that that legislation is written. They need to have been here for a year, essentially, and we just do not know because we have to look at when they registered on the electoral roll, you know, what their business interests were, whatever it might be, that information has not yet been entirely. That's if that's if the legislation going through parliament comes in, isn't it? That's what's planned. Yeah. I mean, I think it could get funny when they say, well, that's not fair. You can't retrospectively or retroactively legislate and try to dispute it. It would depend on using human rights legislation, which there's such fans. You cannot wait for that.

12:18You can deport people who are already here retrospectively. You can't investigate foreign businessmen who moved here as a matter of patriotic duty. Can I say why this story worries me particularly as somebody who spends up time covering America? One of the worst decisions in American politics happened in 2016. It was a supreme court decision called Citizens United. And it's funny. You mentioned human rights because there was a version in that. Essentially, that said, cracking down on free speech, not to let corporations make unlimited donations in elections. And that's the point at which you get superpacks, these political action committees, which as long as they don't technically coordinate with candidates are allowed to do unlimited spending. And that's when you get this enormous, like just American elections now probably cost billions and billions and billions. The one that always just blows my mind is Wisconsin had an election for its supreme court. OK, so OK, a state in the Midwest has a supreme court that rules on say it's election issues or that's the highest court in Wisconsin.

13:18Right. Elon Musk spent $20 million trying to get a Republican elected to that to the one seat, one seat on that because it's a swing state. It's a swing court. And he wanted someone in place who would, I would suggest probably, Jerry Mander, you know, help make sure that there was a more favorable matter of publicans. If there were any decisions about voting rights and regulations that came to it would vote the way that he wanted. So there was over $80 million spent on that race, 20 million by him, including when he promised three people who registered a vote, a million dollars a piece, which is something that again is being investigated as to its legality. But you get to a situation in which one state, one court, one seat, you have a trillion air putting in 20 million dollars into just luckily he lost, which is very funny. And it makes it enjoyable for all of us. But I don't want to see British, one of the things that's best about British politics. We were here at last time talking about Mothin Alley in his 5,000 pounds is that the sums are small and a huge influx, particularly of crypto money, I think would just be extremely

14:21undemocratic. So when Ben Dilo talks about he's not having his voice and democracy, I think it's exactly the other way around. Yeah. And can I add to that the money involved gives rise to people talking about, well, we'll be more professional, which means they will pay people to do jobs that are at the moment are done by volunteers. And they were done to buy people who will go door to door, who will deliver leaflets, who will give their time to a party because they believe in it. If you've got that much money, you just employ large amounts of people who don't care and are doing it for the money. And that seems to be another loss. And it's exactly for our disaster not turning up to the count. Oh, all these nobodies. I want the people who collect and count the ballots. I want the people who are genuinely believing this stuff. But yeah, they spent, I think in the last, before the last general election in the 12 month period, reform was spent about five and a half million quid. Now, this will allow them to go up to the limit, which is sort of 35 million nationally,

15:23if you're standing in every constituency, which I guess they will be. And that extra 30 million, that's going to go on consultant, social, social media, engineering, ultra professional campaign is what it will be. And I think they're more or less say that. Yeah. Can I give you another of D.Lo's lines from his essay in the telegraph about this? My conclusion from reforms recent troubles is that the party should spend less time trying to raise funds to compete on equal terms and more time preparing for government. Oh, it's very selfless, again, very selfless. So selfless. It's previous. But the other thing D.Lo claims is that reform is basically a start-up. You know, the party was founded in 2018 and he says, and I know about start-ups, outfits such as a cardo or octopus energy, suffered teething pains and public blunders on their way to being British success stories. This is Nigel Farage, we're talking about. He's been at the centre of British public life for 20 years. I think we hope for ages for a reform scandal and then just how many of them come up at once? Is the proposed, I think it's called the representation of the people bill.

16:23And the idea is that your donations will be limited if you live overseas to £100,000. And there's the idea that this will be applied retroactively, which would obviously, depending on when these two donors return to the country, they might or might not have to pay the money back and who knows if they will. Does that seem reasonable to you or unreasonable? If this huge amount of money has entered British politics, is it reasonable to try and backdate the change in the rules? I think the timing is unfortunate because it allows reform to say you're only doing this you in the Labour Party because you're really scared that we've got all this money, which of course is true, but it doesn't alter the fact that some sort of legislation about foreign donations is hugely overdue. So I think those two things can be true at the same time. When Philip Ryecroft was a guy who produced this report suggesting these changes, he said one of the reasons that he wanted a limit for overseas donations because it was overseas money was at more risk of originating somewhere it shouldn't do having funneling illicit.

17:26Cash into the political system. You've got to ask people where did this money come from. So with deal, for example, where did your 36 million come from? Well, who will give you some answers which will presumably pass the test, the legal test? But he's the same guy who fiddled the answers when talking about residents of his customers, falsified the information, falsely changed internal tracking. So you've got to trust these guys to tell you where the money came from. So you've got to trust Bendy. You've got to trust. We don't want too much of it. And then trust Robert Jenric who has a very poor record of his donations and legality to vet him. There isn't anyone in this chain who one would normally believe, apart of course from President Trump who pardoned Elio. You see all these guys at these national conservative conferences, which is sort of a held round the world, which is in self inherently hilarious. But it should be a bit that you should be involved in a country, resident in a country, and tax in a country, you should contribute to that country. That means you get to allow to be involved in its politics.

18:28I don't, given that this is the same people we hear about citizens of nowhere and whatever it might be, this is the good form of nationalism, which says you have to have a stake in the country and actually live there in order to participate in its political system. We made Rishi Sunat give up his green card because it was like, well, you can't be a UK prime minister and also keep the option of maybe one day immigrating to the US. And you know, and what's happened? You stayed here. We kept we worked. Yeah, to skilled worker in this country. Well, bit mix was based in say shells. What's wrong with that? Right. Lovely place. Yeah, but some democratic about that. Well, then for it's exactly, it's great transparent tax regime. That's one of the things I think people always say about the say shells, that and the beaches. Can I make one more point about Dilo? It seems as though from his attitude, he says, you know, I believe it's the duty of people with broad shoulders and deep pockets to step up and help reform to win and govern. And he presented in a very policy neutral way. He says he's won't be getting anything out of it in particular. And it's almost as though he has no views whatsoever. And I just wanted to point out as the Guardian reported earlier this year, he funds a political

19:30base in Westminster, a place called the sanctuary where all sorts of people with quite pronounced views have been allowed to use that space. So restore have been broadcasting from there, Rupert Lose Party, the trigonometry podcast who like asking, for example, whether Rishi Sunak is properly British or not. Properly is he English or not? They broadcast from there. He has Jordan Peterson, Claire Fox. There is quite a pronounced set of views there, I would say, that has been given space. Even if Dilo says he doesn't necessarily endorse these views, you don't have to explicitly endorse them to help them out substantially as he's doing with this donation. Yes, I mean, it's not it's not starving children, is it all finding and cure for cancer. I mean, some of some of these things are not altruism in the normal sense we accept it. And you would have to say the same about two crypto billionaires that are quite interested in the regulatory framework around cryptocurrency. Now I believe Mr. Farage also expressed some very strong views about cryptocurrency and

20:36its regulation, didn't he? Yeah, I mean, he's for freeing it up, you know, making the UK a leader in crypto, pretty and really boosting his own, the company he's invested in, stack BTC, which unfortunately isn't doing very well. I mean, that will be their agenda. You know, you're going to keep 72 million pound donors happy, aren't you? Whatever you say about all the other policies. Yeah, I don't know why they're not transparent about it. Just say, everybody know, just stop treating them like idiots. Say, well, obviously we've got a set of policies we want in advance and we want to work with Nigel Farage in order to enact them in law. That's a totally legal thing for somebody to do. Right. Anyway, well, I hope they continue to treat us like idiots. Anyway, you can't complain about all our criticism of them because you've been deal with them because you also fund the free speech union. Oh, good. Everything goes. Ben, if you'd like to shovel any of that money away, I'm afraid we're closed for business. Shop the Sherwin Williams Fall sale and get 35% off paints and stains September 15th through the 21st, with prices starting at 2986.

21:39Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life and with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever. Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin Williams store. Click the banner to learn more. Retail sales only some exclusions apply. See store for details delivered available on qualifying orders. Ring Central's AI receptionist uses voice AI to answer on the first ring so you'll never miss a call again. In just a few minutes, you can personalize your own AI receptionist to answer questions, route calls, schedule appointments, and even send texts in multiple languages. Plus, it's easy to scale. Create unlimited AI receptionists across any phone system. It's all powered by one reliable platform for effortless AI communications. See for yourself at ringcentral.com. Ring Central, voice of your business. Right. Well, that was actually a bit less optimistic than I hoped it might be. So let's turn to something else now. The brave new frontiers of tech. Yes.

22:40AI. Yes. Helen, what's your P-Dume? Thank you very much for asking, Andy. I've been hoping someone would. So P-Dume is the phrase that's used in Silicon Valley to indicate what you think the probability is that AI will kill us all. So a guy resigned from anthropic, which is one of the leading the frontier labs called Jacob Cox and saying, you know, I've had to resign because I think AI probably is going to kill us all, actually. Apparently, this was retweeted by somebody who's still very senior inside anthropic who said, yeah, I also think, actually, I put the P-Dume at 10%, I think probably 10% chance that AI is going to kill us all. And in response to this, Daria Amundai, who's the head of anthropic, has released a manifesto saying essentially, we need to slow the frontier, pace the frontier. And he wants all the companies, the leading edge companies, which is really essentially the ones he's been talking to are him, open AI run by some Altman X AI run by Elon Musk. They've all said they think it's a good idea that they should pace themselves in order to make the risk that we're all going to die from AI slightly less.

23:41Now, these risks, yes. What actually are they? I mean, are people talking about specific things that could occur? Yeah, well, I went and had a look at anthropics latest Theret report, which is quite interesting, where it says, essentially, you have people using its models or trying to use its models, to, for example, get military intelligence from Ukraine, you know, trying to hack people's WhatsApp, trying to download enormous data files from an unnamed African country, like all the details of its businesses. Essentially, one of the things that was recently came out from another company, open AI, was that it created a swarm of agents. So these AI programs are essentially able to operate semi independently and set them a task to try and do a hack in what should have been a contained environment. And instead, they got out of the contained environment, made themselves a little message board where they left each other messages about how to do the hack and worked out how to break into another company's systems. And then, even more impressively, left each other little notes about how they could cover up. In fact, actually, they'd be, one day they'll be donating to reform.

24:43This is what artificial intelligence led us to. So... No, no, clever. But anyway, so that's known as the hugging face incident, because that's the name of the company that they broke into. But essentially, you've got the situation where you can have these huge swarms of agents that are... But themselves, quite powerful. In this case, they were deliberately... Their operating model was to be very persistent, even if a problem looks insoluble, like, really look for a solution. And they did, and their solution was to break the game, essentially, and get out into the open internet. But they also coordinated with each other. So on this message board that they had, 1,200 of them were on there, and they left each other millions of messages. So it was, kind of, essentially, like a whole civilization that rose and fell. There's a brilliant post-bag I call Duac-E, she writes about this stuff, describing it as the rise and fall. And it was like a philip of Macedon, and an Alexander the Great. You know, you had these two agents that managed to break through and say, like, come on, lads, like, through the barrier. So they do have these interesting capabilities. One of the main problems is that no one in the industry really seems to know what the

25:44edge of the capabilities are. And they have been going for scale for so long, building all these data centers we've talked about before, putting more and more compute into them. And they're hoping to get to this stake where they call, which they call, recursive, self-improvement, which essentially means that the AIs get so good they can train each other. So at that point, you hope, you know, the growth curve, how good they are, takes off. But this has spooked everybody else. And so you have the situation where everybody in the industry is going, I think we might be building the hydrogen bomb guys. And then we're going to do about that. And no one really knows whether to believe them or not. I think that's the important thing. I mean, this has come up and we've talked about this before. And the fact that big tech is, if not hated, then certainly people are deeply suspicious of it. So nobody really knows how seriously to take these kind of, but no one is suspicious enough. Right. Everybody goes on using this stuff. I mean, you talk about Philip of Massage on, you know, saying we put it in a box. Anyone read Pandora's box, you open it up and it's released. It seems to me the triumph of the nerds.

26:47I mean, they've read Tolkien, but I'm read anything else. And it might have helped somewhere along the way to worry about the effects of what you're doing. If you think a product is 10% likely to wipe out humanity, if anyone else released a product, I mean, I'd have them all up for walkerimes, send them to the hage. The Donald Trump administration takes a different view. I should have said at this point, but what's really interesting about the hugging face incident is that what those agents did is a crime. They hacked another system. But because it wasn't done by anyone technically, there's no, there's no, no one seems to be really all that interested in pursuing it. This is what I want to know about is the current state of regulation brackets, if any. Right. Okay. So you have David Saxo as the White House's AI's are saying, I don't believe all this talk about doom. I think they're all saying this because they want to get around anti-monopoly legislation and coordinate with each other. There's also a sort of lively conspiracy theory about the fact that it is not the labs that have other business lines, so not meta, not Google who are asking for the slowdown.

27:49So the other conspiracy theory, which is not a total conspiracy theory, is that these frontier labs that only make their money from the AI models do need to slow down anyway because they're burning through cash. They're just running out of cash. And they want to find a way to do that that doesn't like admitting defeat of going like, sorry, lads, we spent all the budget. I haven't got any more. They're trying to embroider it into a narrative that actually this is a very responsible thing to do. You're a professional with money. What have they achieved? Well, people are using AI. I mean, actually, both open AI and anthropocon making decent people have signed up. No one is writing their university essays anymore. I should say this has happened. The New York Times had a very sad story about the fact that there's been lots of unemployment in Kenya because American college students used to employ Kenyans to write their college essays for them. And they just use chat GPT. Oh, God. That one of the things that is really sad, so we have this situation where people and the humanities who wrote. I don't know if you had this Andy a couple years ago, just went, oh, like everything that I've worked towards in my life, which is learning how to write, you're now getting an AI

28:50to do that. Maths has now got to that point. So last week, open AI announced they solved one of the millennium maths equations, these prize equations. There's a now a big dispute about whether or not they nicked someone's research and not doing it. No, I know. I model. And they said it may be possible that de-identified information from these academics might have gotten to our system, but absolutely. But what happened in the wake of that is Terence Tau, who is widely regarded as the greatest living mathematician, put together an open letter of fields medal winner, so like the Nobel for maths, saying, stop doing this. We don't like it. There's a value to humans trying to understand these problems. If you just spit out, let's like the kind of Douglas Adams thing, if you just spit out 42, we've learned nothing. The point of having these problems was that the mathematical community worked on them together, which is exactly where we were with writing. The point of writing an essay or writing an op-ed, partly, I don't know about you, but sometimes I don't really know what I've thought until I get to the end of it. Yeah, absolutely. The point is it's written by a person, but also destroying all the jobs available.

29:52You know, blindly you hear these people say, well, driverless cars, fantastic. I mean, most of the world's less qualified male population is driving cars, lorries, bikes, but we'll put all of them out of the work. There's literally no thought by any of these people into what the future of humanity might look like with your product. We already fight against it, don't we? You know, like when we do exercise it, we're fighting against the fact that life is so efficient physically. We've learned that we've got to kind of go against that a little bit and make ourselves do things. But now we've got the same thing mentally, haven't we? We've got to step up and say, actually, we might need to keep thinking. Yeah. And who are the two people who've come out against AI, the Pope and the King? Oh, great. I mean, you know, the rest of the brilliant cutting edge scientific philosophical community haven't noticed. The people in America seem to think this is great, but we can't seem to overcome the

30:56competitive urge because the whole AI, development of AI has been driven by a competition, often egotistic competition by people like Musk and the anthropic guys and so on. You've somehow got to persuade them to stop being competitive. You don't want to win the race to do. You don't want to be. If someone's going to win the world, it better be me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what is China winning? Are they in the world? Disaster. That is genuinely something that Amadie writes about in his essay because he wants independently evaluators into all of the companies. And there is some of that happens already, but a lot of it depends on whether or not you believe the companies that they really will do that and they'll abide by the arbitration. And then they want to, you know, they want essentially speed limits for the development in America. And then they want an international agreement with China and that backed up by things by, for example, refusing to sell them the most advanced chips, cracking down on smuggling of chips, all of that kind of stuff. But you're right, exactly right. Lots of this depends on having regulated.

31:58This will be very sad for you, Richard, because this is your world. Having regulators that have teeth and that people trust and having international organizations that have got enough buy-in, you know, and what has Donald Trump done, his just destroyed nature, he's destroyed the UN, he's blitzed through all of that. Yeah. Bypass the nuclear inspectorate. Yeah. All of the bodies set up to coordinate international response. Woof. Yeah. You just cut them off at the knees. Well, I can't believe he's getting a second name check in this podcast. And more than he got when he was prime minister, but Rishi Sunek has been covering this because the UK has the AI Security Institute and he was very keen on AI. He held a summit at Bledchley Park in 2023. And he has been writing about the need for effective international regulation. But if you've got Donald Trump saying, I think his latest quite something like, whoever wins AI wins. Yeah. And Rishi Sunek's government does deserve some credit for setting up the AI, what's now the AI Security Institute, which is doing some serious work as a chap chairing it who

33:00has thought about and is very concerned about the threat from artificial general intelligence, you know, that an potential to kill us all off. So it's there. I mean, it's not got the biggest funding in the world, but it's got more than the Americans put into it. You know, when you contrast that with the trillions they're spending on the issue. Anthropic have just withheld their latest model from the AI Security Institute. But at the same time, they also withheld them one of their models from the Pentagon saying they didn't want it used in autonomous weapons. And it was written into the deep mind constitution when they were required by Google that they wouldn't their AI wouldn't be used for weapon development. So there are, but your point is exactly right about the rivalry. Lots of these AI companies are made up from people who flanced out of a company with a previous person or fell out with somebody with a prequel or had very different ethical values. You know, the whole thing about Anthropic was it was founded by people who didn't think that Open AI were taking their, you know, their safety and security seriously. Getting these people to work together is going to be incredibly difficult.

34:01And it's created this kind of bizarre sort of feeling of inevitability where everybody is just like, well, we're on the runaway mine car. And for a bit, sort of view was that we have to raise our head to get there before Open AI because we're more ethical. Yeah. But then Open AI says, well, hang on a minute. But then the whisperer says, oh, yes, the sort of middle management rifle. They're all buying land for the apocalypse. What? Yeah. That's what we're prepping going on. That's encouraging. Yeah. Why didn't they all resign? And if they think they're involved in a major crime against humanity, get out. What? I mean, he does. They would say if you can't stop it, they would tell us you can't really act on principle if the price at the end of that is destruction. I think they would say, they would say, well, I need to be there to make sure it doesn't get to that. Okay. So, if you're more encouraging the rats leaving the sinking ship or the rats staying on the sinking ship. But I think a question is. So we can stop it sinking. Yeah. If you were working on the Manhattan Project in 1940, whatever, do you stay on the Manhattan Project or not? Like, that's the kind of question that's, but that's the question.

35:03They were regulated. Well, but that's the interesting thing and it comes back to everything we were saying in the, you know, about reform too. In any other situation, you have things that are this powerful. There would be immense government involvement. Right. And instead, it's like five dudes. They're making all these decisions and they're entirely relies on how much do you trust these individual men, essentially. And if you look at all the polling, people are quite happy. They like the tools, but they're, if you look at the polling and how popular Elon Musk is, he's got a popularity rating that will make, you know, Ebola look well supported. People just, there is a problem of trust in the people running this industry. And also feeling that they've hyped up how powerful the products are by saying they're going to kill you in an attempt to make themselves more money. So both OpenAI is supposed to be going to IPO and Thropic is going to IPO. I think OpenAI have delayed it. But essentially, if you go, wow, we've got this, it's incredibly hot stuff. It's probably going to kill everyone. But if it doesn't, then it's going to certainly going to make us a lot of money. Is that just part of the kind of hype cycle? That's what Michael Burry, who you might remember, was played by Christian Baile in the

36:04big short. That's what he thinks. That's what the CEO of Grindr thinks. I was surprised to see him quoting the BBC, but good to know his thoughts on this. Right. I mean, the idea that, oh, it's all just a bit of a ruse. You know, maybe it hits. But what if it isn't? Yeah, that's the thing we have to really. Yeah, your PD me showing it. That's exactly what it was higher than you thought it would be. Yeah. And the other problem I think is that although a regulation such as it is in this area is sort of voluntary, there are no rules. There's no laws. Right. There's no sort of saying, look, if you recklessly allow AI to do this or you take it further than this point, that's illegal. You're going to gel. There's nothing much. There's nothing as a genital law as we now know. There's only how Trump feels. Right. That's it. And that's also because we have to compete internationally. We don't want to be left behind in the AI race and all that kind of stuff. That's what we hear from our government as well. And that's what we hear from every government pretty much. But over here, at least we've got the UK government this weekend, Angela Rainer was

37:06saying that we have a robust system in place for dealing with these risks, which is not very reassuring because that was a very word that was used for 25 years by the post office to say that horizon work. Sorry to have you on that. The computer says you're dead. Yes. Right. Now, for our final section, I am sure we can get some optimism in this week. I'm sure of it. We've come to political donations in the UK. We've done AI. We have a coastal holiday. Richard has regenerated as Adam McQueen. Hello, Adam. Hello there. Hi. What's been going on? It's been going on on Britain's lovely coastline recently. Well, you may have spotted. Ported over was closed entirely a couple of Saturdays go by Danny Tomo or Daniel Thomas as grownups might refer to him. And his Patriot platform, which is the new and exciting anti-migrant outfit. He's a former follower of Tommy Robinson, former bodyguard, in fact, to Tommy Robinson,

38:07but he has split. And in the last few months, set up his own little army of black shirts, but actually black shorts. Did you see them in the press and awful lot of them turning up? Not, I think, aware of PG Woodhouse readers to be familiar with his spoof of Oslo Mosley back in the 30s. You know what about this? Andy, you've got your face bowed? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Roder explode in the black shorts. So they were wearing black shorts. I think we were seeing shins. We are seeing shins, but what we're not seeing is faces, which is what has caused an awful lot of constanation, including eventually, Shabbana Mahmoud, the home secretary, spoke up on this and said that people should not be turning up with their faces covered at protest or indeed anywhere else. And ironically, one of the things that these people protesting against is the presence of visible Muslims in the streets of women with their faces covered. One of them tried to claim he was a Muslim woman. Right. And that's why he wouldn't take his stuff identification as it. We have seen the first of these criminal charges anyway. So they're pro-self ideas as well. Right. Very eclectic. Exhibition.

39:08Well, even more interestingly, post these two demonstrations in Dover, one of which, as I say, bought the Port of Dover completely to a standstill. I mean, that's a little bit of national infrastructure as we learn during the Brexit negotiations. Do you know when Interlate Britain were bringing the M25 to a standstill? That sort of thing was sort of again taken quite seriously and injunctions and arrests and all sorts going on. Not quite the same reaction in Dover. So then the next day in Portsmouth, when a migrant dinghy, one of these superdingues, carrying 140 people was brought in. There was another much more spontaneous protest this one seemed to be, where Danny Tomo brought several hundred people down to the harbour side there. We did into the water to try and stop this boat docking. And since then, we've seen the targeting not specifically by Danny Tomo, I'd say, but by followers of his, of R&LI volunteers who were down there, not only to ensure the safety of the migrants who were coming on this boat, but actually the protesters themselves, because they waited into the water. So four different R&LI crews were brought out specifically to illuminate the area and

40:10ensure the safety of the protesters, as well as everyone else, but nevertheless, they've seen themselves doxed online and mud and shame just traitors. Which I would just think, if you're targeting R&LI volunteers as traitors, surely that's a point where you think, hang on, are we the baddies here? Is it not? Thanks to the many readers who've written in this week to say they are an LI. They did fish both Germans and Italians out of the water during the war, because it was part of their remit to stop people drowning. That was one of the strong points. That was one of the things we were kind of proud of. And these were enemy fighting men, not refugees or economic migrants or whatever. You want to call them. The idea of the R&LI are traitors is pushing historical stupidity to new levels. And I think that may have been a reference to obscure for a... We lie battle of Britain references, don't we?

41:11Is that Crimea? Yeah, it's Crimea. Let it go, Andy. It's only the 1850s, then. All right. The reason I ask about the press coverage of it is that this has turned into a story about the press, as well, hasn't it? It has indeed. The next great showing of the Black Shorts was outside the offices of the Daily Mail in Kensington last week, where they turned up. Now, this was really quite extraordinary. And you do sort of pull into question exactly what Danny Thomas feelings about refugee status, because he turned up very, very cross because the Daily Mail, he said, had doxed his mother and revealed his mother's address, well, writing a piece about the Dover and Portismouth protests. They hadn't, in fact. They said that she lived in a neat, terraced house, named the name of the city. He hadn't gone any further than that at all. But nevertheless, he said that, as a result of having journalists from the Daily Mail turn up at her daughter here, as they effectively know, comment, she can never go back to that house. She felt comfortable in that house, but now she doesn't feel safe. She said to the Daily Mail, you have taken that away from her.

42:11You now have 48 hours to do the right thing. I expect this proper gandist, enemy of the people newspaper. Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, having that thrown back at the enemies of the people, of course, was how they described those judges involved in the Brexit legal battle. I expect this proper gandist enemy of the people newspaper to do the right thing. And if you do not, this will continue until you do. And specifically, what were they were demanding was that his mum, the Daily Mail, should rent or buy his mother a new house, relocate her to it. So this is the man who suddenly has decided that people who feel unsafe in their own homes should actually be able to do it. Be able to be relocated at the expense of other people to somewhere they do feel safe. It does sort of undermine that campaign a bit, doesn't it? The Daily Mail didn't use to run those campaigns to win a cottage, didn't they? It might have just been asking if there was one of those left over. I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, they haven't used to my knowledge, done it. Two things have not happened. One is that the Daily Mail has not bought or rented Danny Thomas mother a new house. All they have done is remove the name of the city from that particular, the online version

43:13of that particular article. And the other thing that happened to happen so far is that this has not continued and continued until you do. We have no, the streets of Canada are not currently blocked by the black shorts, but they are not there. I presume that the mail are now decidedly anti and they haven't started running headlines saying things like, hurrah for the black shorts. They are not, no, I'm, this was quite an interesting thing. Another bang up to the minute reference for you there. Hope you like that one. He's in 1930s topical. Come up from the 1850s. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting thing because the Daily Mail of course, we always had a fairly hardline on, on, on, on immigration in, in their columns, but they are very, very much against Danny Tom I mean, the, the, the piece that, that annoyed him so much apart from mentioning his mother, described him as a rabble raser and was extremely anti the idea of him turning up and doing these supposedly spontaneous protests in, in, in, in British ports. I think that's really interesting because there is a sort of assumption that the, the Daily Mail might be behind these kind of, there's, there's been a real swirv in both the

44:15Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph lady, kind of against the more hardline, migrant line, as it's come into the purly of sort of, loop, low and a lot more extremist people who are prepared to kind of like go kind of beyond the law and, and, and, and take things into their own hands. Is part of that perhaps to do with the fact that Tommy Robinson is soon going to go on trial for allegedly harrassing to Daily Mail journalists? Yeah, certainly this is not the first case. We have to be slightly careful what we're saying, also because this literary, a, a criminal trial that is coming up next month where Tommy Robinson is charged with harassment, causing fear of violence of to Daily Mail journalists. And this was over a, a similar case where they wrote a piece about him after a, a protest a couple of years ago and there were photos of him in a holiday villa, which he said had endangered his kids, the, uh, the, uh, electrical charges is to do with his response to that. And presumably he denies the harassment. So it's going to, it's going to trial. He does. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's going to, it's going to trial as I say in, in October this year. I mean, we do have to be careful, but it's not unreasonable to say that a publication that is involved in illegal dispute with any gentleman of the political persuasion that

45:20Mr Robinson might, might take a dim view of his subsequent activities. Is that fair? Yes, yes. I think that would be a very fair thing to say. I have a question, which is how many people are in the Danny Tomo army? Because you said they, he obviously can't get people to turn up day after day, but there were, they look like hundreds at sportsmith. I think we're certainly talking in the hundreds. I mean, the, the, the, the dover one was the kind of really pre-arranged one. It was an extraordinary statement from the police after it where they said that these, this was spontaneous. And actually it turns out to be an amy, but it was a lot of organisation went into it. Uh, and they did have prior warning of it, not least from all the people in the local village, where, who, uh, phoned up the police the night before and said, um, there are suddenly hundreds of cars have turned up and parked all over our recreation ground and something's going on here. To know that they were all being loaded into lute and vans and taken down to dover to block a deport the next day. So there are a lot of questions. Certainly, Shabana Mahmoud has self had a lot of questions about the, the, the policing of that, that, that particular thing. And I, this is a relatively new organisation. They were only set up in sort of June of July this year. I mean, uh, Danny Tomo has previously been involved, as we said with Tommy Robinson.

46:22Also with the rays of the colours movement, which was the one, you know, last year, which was about hanging tatty flags on, on, on lampposts all over the land and, uh, and, and, and, and during St George's crosses on, on roundabouts to Phyllis or with, uh, with, with great pride, many roundabouts, best many roundabouts in the world. But this is different, isn't it? I mean, the idea of men in black, young men in black, of, of what they would call fighting age, large numbers of them marching up and down the street. This is, this is different from, uh, United Kingdom parades where people are singing and wearing crusader outfits. This is very sinister and the public do not like the look of it. No, they do not. Um, and it is extraordinary, man. And Danny Tomo is absolutely insistent that this is not about violence and this is not about intimidation. Well, what the hell else is it about? I mean, you know, there is video of him outside the Daily Mail offices. Um, uh, he hasn't, hasn't brought a loud speaker with him, but he's just sort of, he's got quite a good shouting voice and he's prone as well because part of this is, well, is, is a, a conversion to Christianity, which he underwent when he was in prison, uh, for, we haven't even mentioned the, uh, the attempted kidnap of a man who he said wrongly had stolen, uh, 10,000 pounds

47:22worth of drugs from him. So that's a whole other aspect to, uh, reasons why the, uh, Daily Mail and various other people may not approve of this chat past. Uh, but he said, um, sorry, outside the Daily Mail, I want someone from the Daily Mail, a representative to come outside to me, they can stand behind the police line so they'll feel safe. I'll move my men away up there. I mean, this, this is, this is not unthreatening, isn't it? This is an acknowledgement that, that your presence is quite threatening. But another thing they were shouting a great deal over, though, was Christ is King. Hmm. So there is a strong strain in this of what they call Christian nationalism. That's very American. That came out of the kind of, kind of, kind of so in Charlie Kirk sort of drift of, of that bit of the, of the American right. Yes. And it became a sort of meme after that. But also then that wraps into something that is more Tommy Robinson, which is anti-Islam, which is this critique specifically of immigration is that these are Muslims who are invading Europe. And they want to institute, sharia law. And it would change the car. You're like, complexion of the country and its religion. And it has got that Christian, which to take you all the way back to our first item is something that also concerns people in the kind of James

48:24or type space, you know, the decline of Christianity and the fact that Islam is seen as this much stronger religion that is going to kind of bully, woolly liberal C of E types into submission. Can we just remind the listener James or the head of policy policy director for reform? You can't, you know, he has his own compound in Cambridge University where he has converted, makes shipping container where he holds masses. He, you know, has become very active in the theology department. But he also has links to that urbanist movement, the Hungarian movement, which was again was about the revival of Christianity. Why do these people all have their own compounds? I find it very worrying. How can anyone can afford a compound in this day and age? In this economy. It's just one of the things that most upsets me. And this is why I keep printing cartoons. The last one I really liked was it was Christ preaching on the servant about the beestitudes and the number of men in mega hats saying, what kind of Christianity? That's exactly why Andrew take converted to Islam, you know, Manus Firmman. So he said that Christianity was a cocked religion. But this is the, you know, that these are the weird currents that we have flowing through our politics at the moment.

49:26It's this idea that you could be a kind of Christian crusader army. You know, Pete Hexeth has got a crusader tattoo. All these old battles have been re-heated. We should say as well, it's not just the Daily Mail who have spoken out against the Danny Tombo protests and face and backlash for it. Reform have as well. You were talking about them earlier in the podcast, but Nigel Farage explicitly condemned it. So it was disgusting. The protest at Dover, the people turning up in Blight with Bala Clappers on, at which point the next day Danny Tombo himself turned up at a reform press conference that the year yourself was giving and started trying to shout him down. Telling the reason that they're covering their faces is because they know they're going to be targeted. So apparently, you know, they're worried about being targeted and intimidated themselves, but not so unhappy about meeting that out to other people. Well, I doubt we'll ever hear from the McGann, it'll probably be fine. And there's the optimism we were looking for at the start of the episode. That is it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much to Helen, to Ian, to Adam, and to you for listening. If you would like to get hold of Private Eye, the latest issue is still available and it's

50:29got a very, very, very funny cover, which I don't think has prompted any legal letters so far. No, I think the joke of Nigel Farage, eating oysters, someone saying, shellfish and hym saying, yes, of course I am. Top, top political satter. No jury would convict. So that's available on Newstands or if you go to private-i.co.uk, you can get a subscription at a very reasonable rate. You don't need to have 36 million pounds knocking around in your back pocket. So thank you very much again. We'll be back again in an affordable night with another of these. The only remaining thing to say is thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.