Taking Action for a Better Future

Hello, PSUK listeners. This is Nish with what I can only describe as the least surprising uh Thursday morning update we've ever had to do uh on the podcast. We just wanted to add a little thing before the episode starts just, to update you on where we are on Thursday, the 14th of May. So the episode that you're about to hear was recorded yesterday on the Wednesday. Now it appears that there's even more uncertainty on the Labour leadership contest and things are ramping up. Um, according to the BBC, friends and allies of West Streeting expect his challenge to be imminent, though uh Starmer's camp is briefing that he doesn't have the support. His camp seems to be briefing that he does have the support. I think it's all very alarming. Um only insofar as do we really want a prime minister who is paedophile adjacent adjacent. That would be my big concern, okay. If one of the issues that we have with Keir Starmer is the appointment of Peter Mandelson, I'm not sure appointing uh the person who is even closer to him in cabinet is a great idea. Now, complicating things even further, in an interview with the Guardian this morning, Angela Rayner uh has ruled out launching a coup, but has not ruled out running uh for Prime Minister. Uh she's actually now been cleared uh by HMRC over any wrongdoing over her taxes. That's an exclusive story that's come out this morning that's run b collaboratively between the Guardian and ITV. Um she says she wants to play her part in the leadership debate ahead and has said that Starmer needs to reflect on whether or not he needs to leave his position. Also, Ed Miliband is back. It's twenty fifteen, baby. And Ed Miliband is in the frame. Uh he's reportedly mulling a bid as a stop streeting candidate should wear streeting make a move. So I'll now hand you back to myself and Coco Khan yesterday um to reflect on the episode and we actually do get into the runners and riders in the impending leadership challenge with the political streamer No Justice MTG. There's also a great conversation with Mo Gauda about AI. It's a fantastic episode. So let's get into it. Hi, this is PodSafe the UK. I'm Nishkumar. And I'm Coco Kahn. Will he go? Won't he go? Has he already gone while you're listening to this? These are the questions we're asking this week as Keir Starmer appears to be clinging on for dear life. And honestly, at some point, you 've got to admire the man's refusal to leave. There are rumours that Paul Gascoigne has turned up at number ten with a fishing rod and some fried chicken. To rock Westminster, kicked off by an unlikely main character, Catherine West, will be discussing it all. We'll also be discussing how it's possible to take Richard Tys seriously after his performance on Laura Koonsberg. Plus, we speak with former Google executive Mo Gaudat on how AI is here to destroy us, but how it could save us too. It's a light show. Right, let's get into it. The nation's press have once again, set up camp outside Downing Street, like it's Glastonbury this week. Keir Starmer's position has become less and less stable. So there are calls for his resignation coming from all over the party. Now, at the time of recording, on Wednesday morning at ten thirty-seven AM . Four ministers have resigned, uh, urging the PM to go, joining more than 80 Labour MPs who are now saying the same thing in public. But at the same time, the party is still deeply split. More than one hundred Labour MPs have also come out to back Starmer, saying now is no time for a leadership contest. At least for now, he is staying in post. It might all be chaos, but we've got the perfect guest to discuss it all. Joining us now is Helena, aka No Justice M TG, a Twitch streamer, YouTuber, and regular contributor to Navarra Media. Helena, welcome to PodSave the UK and sorry we introduced you as the perfect guest to discuss chaos. Well, I mean, given the fact that the last six years of British politics has permanently been in the banter timeline. It is the perfect time to be a political YouTuber because the content never stops with this government. The banter timeline is something I've not I've not heard of this. What is the banter time? Have you not heard of the banter time line? I thought banter was meant to be fun for all involved. I don't feel like this has been fun. Banter's a mixed bag. What they did on top gear was banter. Okay. It's a very mixed bag. Um so look, it's all moving very fast, but let's just take stock brief ly of how we've got here in the short term. Last week's local elections, Labour got well and truly walloped. Uh, all in all, they lost 38 councils. Uh, there were big wins overall for reform. They gained 14 councils , having held none previously. So the trend continued in the devolved parliament elections. In Scotland, the scandal-ridden SNP won the largest number of seats, whilst Labour fell into joint second place alongside reform. And in Wales, Plyde Cymru got the most seats for the first time while Labour, who have dominated Welsh politics since nineteen twenty-two, were reduced to just nine. Two days after the elections on Saturday, Labour MP Catherine West laid down the gauntlet for the Starmer departure. She's urged him to set out a timetable to leave by September, leading to a lot of people over the weekend frantically googling Catherine West. But the important thing is this is where we've landed on Wednesday. So Helena is surely at this point Starmer's position is untenable. I mean I think so. I don't think there's ever been a case where there's been enough people within the party of the Prime Minister who's sitting at the time who've expressed their desire to for them quit above the threshold at which that they would reach some kind of confidence agreement. Of course, like when it comes to the Tories, it's always been the nineteen twenty two committee, the certain summer of submitted letters. Obviously it's different with Labour needing eighty-one MPs to register support for a challenger to the leadership, right? They have the names of people who want him to resign but no challenger, which is a weird position to be in, but I don't think that this was ever going to end anything other than this. Keir Starmer has basically been on the rocks ever since Mandelson stuff dropped since September last year, and so the fact that it's taken up to the absolute humiliating election defeats that they had last week and M Ps canvassing and finding out just how much people on the doorstep hated not just the party, but Keirstammer specifically, who polls lower than the Labour Party as an individual politician compared to his own party, that we were always going to end up with Keir Starmer being forced to quit. And I think that once we've reached this threshold it's uh it's when rather than if. Would this count as a banter moment? But I over the weekend was listening to the Why did you say that like my mother says the word banter I'm trying to understand the banner timeline. But I heard Angela Rayner saying, Oh, you know, it's really given us a lot to think about and I had this moment being like, Is this a joke? I think it was quite widely held that Labour was gonna get a kicking for a really, really long time. Because of all this unpredictability that was actually incredibly predictable, there is a part of me that thinks, okay, well, let's just be open about who's gonna get it. Who do we think's gonna get it? Let's predict it because it's predictable. Is it predictable though? I mean, Helena, why do you think that there has been this mass outpouring of frustration from within the party, but no person willing to challenge Kirst Armer. What's this cause of a sort of revolution without a leader? Well I think that's because no one's ever really wanted to shake the boat up until now, and the fact that we even only got to this position because of Catherine West's intervention. Because I mean my initial reaction to her intervention was like, well at least someone realizes the building is on fire. At least someone has realized that this isn't just, you know, midterm blues, it's not just some kind of like broader historic uh reaction to a government that's sitting at the time, right? This isn't just a small anti incumbency bias. This is the whole of Labour's coalition falling out of the bottom . And given that how much hubris has been shown by Labour MPs up until this point, there has been no one who's wanted to challenge. Of course we have Streeting with his problems who's indelibly linked to Peter Mandelson because of the te exxtch anges that they're gonna have published with the Mandelson files that's gonna be released sometime soon, because of the Tories, humble address. There's also Angela Rayner's problems with her tax stuff, and Andy Burnham isn't in Parliament yet. So all the main kind of runners and riders to actually put their name forward to get the eighty one people that they need to sign the motion to challenge Keir Starmer. None of them really want to run for leadership just yet. But the parliamentary Labour Party have realized that there is no time for people to set out their stall to be able to massage the media enough to be able to justify why they should run try and unseat Starmer. Starmer is the problem, they have these local election results. He needs to go, and the rest of the PLP and potential challengers need to be able to get with the programme rather than find the perfect time to do the challenge. So Wes Streeting again as we record has been to Downing Street and met Starmer for one So I mean I've no idea what we're supposed to interpret from that. Either he waited. How long does it take to say it's not you it's, me. Okay? I just I ha I want different things. I reckon twenty minutes is about right . So th those are the three people, they've all got issues. Obviously Andy Burnham's issues are the most complicated to resolve because he's literally not an MP. Angela Raynus tax affairs, that's a sort of swirling issue, as you say. I I'm personally shocked that we're even having a conversation about West Street and given what we know about his closeness to Peter Mandelson and what we know about his closeness has sort of partially been revealed by him releasing a load of his own WhatsApp messages, and I just feel that no one has ever published their WhatsApp messages for a good reason. No one has ever been like l I'll fine, I'll show you all my WhatsApp because things are going incredibly well. Um it's i th th the the the Burnham side, so there's been a lot of conversation that somebody is going to stand down uh for Andy Burnham. Obviously he was blocked um by the Labour NEC committee in Gorton and Denton. Um there were reports that Clive Lewis, who's the MP from Norwich and a former guest on the show, might step down. He immediately quashed those. Take every little bit of political news you hear through X uh with a hefty pitch of thought, but apparently an MP called Al Khanz is also uh being talked about. Uh, you know, he's certainly not famous, I I confess I did have that new phone hoodieus moment hearing about Al Khan. Um but he's someone who doesn't have any baggage, at least. Well the thing is with Al Khan's though is that he's who's the MP for Birmingham's Selly Oak and he's a twenty twenty four intake. So he has no real experience, right? Like we thought Kirston was unexperienced when becoming leader after you know four years of being an MP, but Al Khanes is just a parachute MP in Birmingham Sally Oak. And I as far as I can glean from the information that I've got, Al Khan's is backed as being some kind of leadership candidate because he was a squaddy, right? Yeah. That's it. That that's that is the Labour Party kind of triangulation machine going, well, we know that the voters they really like people who serve the country. Doesn't matter about their political vision or what they want to do with the actual leadership, it doesn't matter about any of that, which you to find the right vibes to be able to appeal to the public. And like you just had a big electoral loss because the person you have in your leadership position at the moment, has no vision. He admitted he has no vision, can't communicate well with the public. The idea that you can just replace him with another balloon with a face on it to be able to be ventriloquised by Morgan McSweeney or whoever in terms of policy. It's it's really kind of rerunning all the same problems that led us to this point. Also just loving that double entendre on parachute MP there. That was great. I'm gonna ask you both a question I suspect I know the answer to. Can he hold on? Now, the pitch he's making emerged last Saturday with his vision for the future, which it turns out looks a lot like nineteen ninety seven. His headline pitch is bringing closer ties with Europe and bringing back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harmon as government advisers. I've said this a million times on this show, but there is a 30 rock joke where Alec Baldwin says NBC strategy for being the number one network again. Part of it is make it nineteen ninety-seven through either science or magic. That appears to be a lot of what Keir Starmer is offered. Does either of you think that this is going to work? I I mean unless it's a ploy to make the voter base that is turning away from Labour the, traditional al millenni voter base, unless the tactic is let's make you feel young, even though you're quite old, by like pretending it's 1997. I don't really get it. You know, I'm very flattered that their tactic is one that I I personally can't remember first hand. But I'm not sure that flattery is uh is the way I mean I'm sure you've got a better take than that, Eleanor. Well, I mean it's very funny to me, insofar as the two things that I think underpin why the bottom f'sallen out of Labour's coalition at these local elections, is that both sides of the populist left and right, which is where Labour's votes have gone, pr um predominantly to the populist left, but some to the populist right as well, is these are both reactions to Blair ism. And in terms of the populist right, it's backlash to you know, the kind of remainer sect of people who are currently in charge of the Labour Party. And so to start talking about the European Union again when they've just lost in places that were like seventy percent leave voting wards in swathes of like red wool seats. Like that's what lost them the election in twenty nineteen. And then to also go right, we know that you hate Thatcherism and neoliberalism, which the Blair administration continued for so long when it comes to the popul ist left. And we know that you hate all of the kind of equalities kind of um constitutional framework that was built throughout kind of the Blair revamp of the constitutional nature of this country, which is a lot of what the populist right hate. And to bring back two emblematic figures of new labour that that the millennials and uh kind of post industrial communities really, really hate because it didn't represent their politics at all. It smacks a few bris, really, in terms of the fact that Keirstummer when he talks about Blairism, he goes by or they be these people won, right? He says Blair I like Blair as a leader because he won elections. That's his that's his metric, that's his barometer for being a successful Labour politician is how many elections they win rather than what good they did for the country. And it again it shows that these people don't understand the reasons why they're losing. It's a bit like, you know, we're gonna model ourselves on uh Thanos ' techcause nically at the end of that film he did win. Technically. At the end of the first film. At the end of the Yeah, I know, whatever. At the end of the first film, he did win. But what we know from the MCU universe is that in the long run, he lost. I'm gonna send that to Kirstama There's a good guardian column today written by Raphael Bear that I would urge people to go and read. It's I think a sort of relatively nuanced critique from someone who I I would hazard a guess is sort of ideologically affiliated more towards Starmer's wing of the Labour Party. He sort of expresses this idea that it's probably not there's no point in challenging Starmer unless somebody comes forward with a platform to challenge him on, rather than just a a change of leadership, there needs to be an actual change of policy. And I I I am interested in the course of this article, which I would urge people obviously to go and read. There is, I believe, maybe the kind of epitaph of the kind of political philosophy of Starmerism . Uh I'm just reading directly from it here. The harsher judgment is that the Starmer project made a fetish of pragmatism as an electoral tactic to the exclusion of policy, the avoidance of awkward questions, how to raise money for public services, how to repair the damage inflicted by Brexit amounted to a ban on thinking about answers that the determination to purge labor of Jeremy Corbyn's legacy was pursued with factional monomania that mislabelled dissent of any kind as toxic leftism. I do think that is a sort of paragraph summation of everything that was wrong with Stama ism. So Helena, trying to move forward, what can the Labour Party actually do to win back support from here? If we're saying that there's nothing that Starmer can do personally. What should the party be looking to do? Well I've got a well-formulated theory on why I think that Labour are gonna find it really difficult to understand where to move. Because I think as I talked about before, with the coalition falling away from them. It's actually a coalition of people who come from kind of really disparate kind of political wings of this country and political cultures of this country. What was kind of emblematic of the Labour coalition? It was kind of liberal, socially liberal millennials were progress ive in urban centres, alongside ethnic minorities were treated with abject racism by the rest of the political establishment, and people who lived in post industrial communities in this country, who were burnt by Thatcher, who were burnt by neoliberalism, who were burnt by the closing of the mines, who were burnt by deindustrialization, and who clung to the Labour Party as what should be the party that created this industrial base to begin with, or at the very least created a well-paid, highly unionized industrial base, right? But this coalition, I don't think, can be rebuilt because a lot of these post-industrial communities, they're very old now, in terms of how deindustrialization has changed the demographics of this country. It's meant that young people who've grown up in these satellite towns, market towns, industrial towns, etc., etc., they've all moved to big cities because in the Blair era, you had to go to university. That was the big thing, 50% of the country in university, and so they've all moved to Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Liver pool, wherever it might be, to go and study. And they've stayed in those areas 'cause that's where all the service sector jobs are, now they're in a service economy. And so these are two people who, while they have political reasons for opposing the Conservatives and supporting Labour . They don't have shared material interests. Retired people who live in post industrial or rural communities, they want higher pension provision and their mortgage kind of uh rate to stay low, they need their house price to continue to increase, increase housing equity, because lots of these people are retired or close to retiring and aren't at work. They need low interest rates to maintain the cheap mortgages and they want their pension contributions to be able to end up with something to retire on. Young people don't care about any of that. In fact, they want cheap housing. They want lower taxation in lots of cases, or not taxes not to go up, which will happen if we have an aging society with these continual pension contributions that's necessary to maintain the triple lock that Labour don't want to change. And they want more house building to be able to do that. And of course they have a socially liberal political outlook on cultural issues that isn't shared at all by these kind of more patriotic, more socially conservative post industrial areas. And I don't think that that's a coalition that they can rebuild, at least not in the next three years, right? I think the one thing they would need is some huge industrial strategy to bring back jobs and security and prosperity to areas that have been left behind by Thatcherism and left behind by Blairism as well, that just subsumed the country and the London financial sector. And that kind of large scale investment first of all , you can't really do that in three years and expect it to turn the country around. And second of all, like they're already precluded from doing so by the fiscal rules, by all the promises that were laid out in the manifesto in twenty twenty four. They promiseised we wouldn't ra taxes, we wouldn't borrow too much. And those are two things that you'll need to do if you want to have an industrial strategy to win these people back, or to nationalise a bunch of public services, which is what young people want. So they've really bound themselves with this strategy. They've bound themselves with the people that they have in the Labour Party because they selected all the candidates to be loyal to Star mer. So even if they wanted to change the political paradigm, to create a new policy prospectus, whichever new leader comes in, they're constrained with a bunch of manifesto commitments that were put in place to win over a totally different sector of the electorate. But also can we take anything hopeful from the election results ? This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. When it comes to sending money abroad, many providers claim to offer free fees and competitive rates. But don't be fooled, this can just be code for inflated exchange rates. With the WISE account, you can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies without ever having to worry about hidden fees. Sending pounds across the pond, most transfers arrive in 20 seconds or less. 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And then the other day I checked my bank account and I forgot that if you use any ride sharing apps and you don't update the card, you'll be gotten with the hidden fees. Didn't feel wise then Nish. Didn't feel wise , you need to download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Terms and Conditions apply. Podsave the UK is brought to you by Shopify. Starting something new can be exciting, but also properly daunting, whether it's launching a business, starting a creative project, or putting something out into the world, there's always a voice in your head asking, what if this doesn't work? Exactly. You're always asking questions like, what if no one listens? What if no one buys? What if no one cares? Most good ideas begin with a leap of faith. And what makes that leap easier is having the right tools behind you, which is where Shopify comes in. 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Now, when asked about this, reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice didn't exactly engage with the issue, I think it's fair to say. We've we've heard all the smearing and the sneering. Let me tell you what people really concerned about. Forgive me, Laura I'm going later, I'm going later to a campaign against the scourge of anti-Semitism, right, which is the greatest threat facing us here in uh particularly in London, but elsewhere across the UK. How do we feel about Richard Tice becoming the new face of anti racism in this country? Well that was really interesting post I saw by Hugo Rifkind, uh essentially acknowledging the fact that there is this broader move from people on the right and indeed the far right to be able to project themselves as the this bastion of anti racism by you know obviously taking up the flag of the legitimate cause of the opposition to anti Semitism. But what I can see purely for cynical reasons to be able to redirect people's anger away from as we've seen the comments have been made by reform counselors, high profile figures of the broader dissident right in this country. They need to find a way of being able to demarcate themselves and tie themselves to the cause of anti Semitism or opposition to anti Semitism to give themselves plausible deniability for the level of racism that their counsellors have engaged in. And I mean their counsellors have engaged in it routinely, I think just for legal reasons. I should mention that Stuart Pryor has denied being a racist. So you very rarely hear them admit to it, but um I feel like that's a boilerplate. J. Leslie Cooper, who was elected for the Bootle Westboard of Sefton Council, has resigned the party with whip and had his membership revoked over Holocaust denial. Nathaniel Mende was elected as a reform councillor in Sheffield. According to Hope Not Hate, he's allegedly described himself as an ethno-nationalist. Um, and blame Jews for anti-Semitism because they overwhelmingly favour open borders. So again, it's very, very difficult to swallow this crap from Richard Tice. You know, there's a scrutiny deficit. It's not even about the type of racism or the specific group that that racism is aimed at. I think it's who the racism comes from and it's the consequence of a disparity in the scrutiny offered by v to left wing candidates versus right wing candidates in terms of the press coverage, I think. Any racism from the left is prosecuted very harshly the idea of like Jews being more uh supportive of open borders right that was the Tanzer candidates uh position that that they extolled there. This is very similar to the cultural Bolshevism conspiracy theory, which is essentially an anti Semitic conspiracy theory that immigration has been forced upon the West by kind of some Jewish cabal or whatever in the background that's kind of rigged it this way. And that's manifested in terms of how the far and distant right talk about it right now is as the term cultural Marxism, right? Yeah. Judeo-Bolshevism, cultural cultural Marxism, the same thing. Guess which politicians have explicitly said that they oppose cultural Marxism, Twella Bravaman and Nigel Farage, to reform UK MPs. Cultural Marxism is a tro that was very prevalent in Nazi Germany. You're absolutely correct to raise this because there has been a normalization of rhetoric associated with the great replacement theory. And I'm always sort of lightly astonished that people are so anti Semitic that they're blaming us on the Jewish community. You know, like I I'm not instructed by Jewish people to do anything unless you count Bob Dylan and Larry David. But I don't think that's what they're talking about here specifically. I I'm I think that Shasta Aziz, the anti racism campaigner and community organiser based in Oxford has said many British Muslim communities feel scared and intimidated by the reform victories and also feel sad that their neighbours have voted for a party that openly calls for the deportation of members of our communities. Barker said it had been the worst campaign he'd fought in and has said that homophobia, transphobia are more acceptable now. Um however he did go on to say it doesn't represent the way most people in Birmingham feel. Unfortunately, in a deeply divided election when you can win with twenty percent of the vote, you are going to sometimes get a minority view winning. That's a really important idea, right? That it's important to not come away from these elections and think that the majority of the British people are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic, but there is electoral mathematics that means that people who hold those views have a disproportionate say in who's getting elected, right? Yeah. And I think w it's important to not losee hop and to remember that yes, it because of our system, it is uh, you know, not the majority getting the majority seats on these councils. But just to go back to Richard Tyres, I have watched with horror at how they have just jumped onto, yeah, you know, a an actual real problem for their nefarious ends. It's shocking. I've never seen anything like it. So, you know, anyone that's worried, I think that is absolutely fair enough. Now if all of that got you down, you're not alone. But beneath the doom and gloom, there were some genuinely good results in last week's election. And you know, we look, we're a progressive podcast, so we should celebrate the victories of the various progressive parties and there were there were quite a few. Reform didn't do as well as they predicted in Wales. They've been pinning their hopes on the nation last year Farage said Wales was the party's priority There were also huge successes for the Green Party. It was in many ways a watershed moment for them, with their leader Zach Polanski soon declaring the two-party politics system as dead and buried. Nowhere was this clearer than in Hackney. Uh the East London Borough had voted Labour in every election since 1982, but then this happened. I do hereby declare that Zoe Garbert is duly elected as the mayor of hackney . Thank you . And just as Hackney should belong to Hackney residents, this administration is yours. Because the people of Hackney own Hackney The Greens also won the council comfortably whilst Labour saw their number of seats tumble from 50 to just nine and, elsewhere across England the party picked up four hundred and forty-one seats, taking five councils under control. So look, Helena, this is clearly a win. I guess the question is what to do now? Oh, you know, how should they grow their base and can they be a real challenger in the next three years ahead of an election? Well I think that's probably true. I think it's probably true that it will be a challenger. We're looking at when it came to the overall projected vote share. There's a real scrum for second place behind reform in terms of how if the elections had been on a national level it would be expanded or projected to look across the country. The Greens came out in second place on eighteen percent behind reforming KN twenty six percent, according to UGAV. So they are legitimately, they can legitimately see themselves as challenges and legitimately see themselves as being people who can take the fight to reform in a world in which that there's been populist breakdown. Like Luke Trill from Warren Common talked about how actually, despite everyone talking about kind of block voting in terms of left versus right, which is true to a large extent, there is a group of like populist voters who will vote for reform who also considered voting for the Greens as well. And it's ensuring that there's a policy programme, there are solutions to people's issues from that block of voters that the Greens can be able to strategi ze towards, right? I I've always kind of talked about on stream that voters don't really have policy prescriptions as such in lots of cases. They have concerns about what's happening with the country and they want to know what politicians and political parties are going to do to solve those issues. And so you can win people over. We saw Jeremy Corbyn win over 15% of the electorate from 25% to fifth to forty percent in 2017 by being able to show that the left-wing progressive politics, socialist politics could solve the concerns of the country in a post-Brexit world. And I think the Greens can do a very similar thing to be able to grow their base . And it's going to involve a lot of community organizing, growing the membership of the Green Party to be able to find a way of showing people that politics can be a force for good. It can not just be done on a national level, con confined to Westminster and the psychodrama, but can be on a local level. Because you painted quite a vivid and might I say savage uh picture of how the Labour Party coalition is just gone. You know, it can't really happen anymore. And I wonder if might this be a problem for the Greens , because their new votership are probably younger, often urban, but they want housing. And how do you marry that with the traditional Green Party? Can they create a broad coalition that can actually stay true to their green, we don't want more buildings, you know, we we we want to be skeptical of um massive infrastructure transformation projects and an urban voter base that really needs that now. It's gonna be difficult to try and convince the development skeptical Greens to be able to move into a new space where they admit that well, if we live in a world where we do need to increase the population size because we have an aging population, if we don't have migration, we're gonna see the entirety of our pension system just collapse in on itself. The to to make sure that we have the necessary inventory to house people in this world is going to involve development and there has to be a level of reckoning with the political realities. Every small party can be very idealistic in how they approach politics. Once you grow to be a national contender, pragmatism will have to take over eventually in the world in which we have five six party politics, seven party politics if you include uh all of the different nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, you're going to need to find a very specific coalition to build around and And with urban voters, you're going to have to relent on development at some point. The question is how quickly will they learn that before young voters realise that housing costs are spiralling out of control and they do need somewhere else to go. Aaron Ross Powell And how long have the Greens got to work it out? Because the scrutiny being applied to them is enormous. We see that all the time with any progressive party. But nonetheless, I mean like I we can't talk about the Greens and not talk about Zach Polansky. I think. The attacks on him in the press have been bananas. You know, I I I d there's so many headlines I can't even m begin to go through them all, but a spectator article in April announced that the party was mad, bad and dangerous, even though I'm pretty sure that was a uh isn't that phrase about Lord Byron and he was like a real cool dude. But anyway, and then there's all the cartoons of Zach Pulanski which I they've been widely criticised as anti-Semitic. I think we can we just need to look at them to to see the truth on that. Um I I actually wonder sometimes as well about this this relentless attack because there's been stuff about not being a British Red Cross spokesperson but actually having done some hosting for them, working in the Ministry of Justice building, but he was an agency worker so, technically well, you know, it like it's all this sort of it's it all seems quite small and around the edges. And I wonder if it's actually at some point going to like backfire where people who were like, you know, kind of cool about him become really protective of it because we all love an underdog. I mean, honestly, Nish, some of it amounts to like Zach Polansky didn't lip passengers off the train before he got on. But some of it is getting a bit bananas now. Do you know what I mean? I I'm perfectly happy for journalists to be investigating Zach Polansky's council tax affairs. I'm perfectly happy for Keir Starmer to be thoroughly scrutinized and held to account. I I just wish we were talking the same amount about Polanski paying council tax on a fucking narrowboat as we are over a five million pound gift given to Nigel Farage by a cryptocurrency billionaire not long before Farage announced that he was standing in Clacton and as the leader of the reform party. Ella, do you think the Green Party machine is ready for that le the level of media scrutiny that it is going to have applied to it? Also, where the fuck did that five million pounds come from? What the hell is I feel like I've I feel like I've gone mad here. Well uh I'm talking about council tax on a narrowboat for I've got five million pounds. Banter timeline Nick this is the banter timeline and no one's having any fun. It's very sad on the timeline. Well, so I mean I don't think the Green Party have been ready for the media scrutiny at all. I really don't think that they have. I mean we we saw in terms of the fact that the all of the kind of record of policy statements, i.e. things that have been voted on at conference that have become part of the broader perspective of how the Greens would like to see society in the distant future, whatever. And that's just been open to view and journalists have been able to go in and pick out policies from twenty ten, two thousand nine or whatever it is, and then use that to be able to attack the Greens, right? So instead of having a conversation about cost of living, they're talking about fifty-five man an hour speed limits or they've been talking about uh the narcotics policy for the Green Party, for example. And when it comes to the Zach Polansky's history, we really are getting into the kind of 2018, 2019 Corbin derangement syndrome era of ridiculous headlines, right? Remember the headline the LBC put out when it was just like Jeremy Corbyn's championing free school meals is as the nasty face of Corbyn's Labour? This is the kind of this is the the the media environment that the left are coming into. The issue of course, is that unless they get a real thing that sticks, this council tax thing might stick, but in terms of the British Red Cross or when it comes down to like the hypno boob story or whatever it is, most young people who are the kind of target demographic for Zach Polansky or indeed progressive voters of any age, far more concerned with policy than personality in terms of my experience, and on top of that, none of them give a shit about what the legacy media have to say. Most people under the age of forty aren't really concerned with what the BBC or the Telegraph or the Times are saying. They're mostly getting the news from social media, from their favourite creators, from their excellent podcasts they may or may not follow. Excellent. Uh and so whether what what the Murdoch hacks are saying about Zach Polansky isn't gonna be any of concern of theirs, but in terms of being an electoral force, it also involves winning over people The Greens won that stonking majority in Gordon and Denton off of undecided voters who made their mind up at the ballot box, and random stories about not paying a council tax will be more than likely to come up in people's minds when they're making snap decisions about electoral politics. And that's in my mind where the danger comes. Not losing the base, but losing potential curious voters. Zach Polansky didn't say my dog was a good boy. Zach Pelansky didn't respond to my text with just one letter, K. I found it aggressive. Anyway. Helena, thank you so much for coming on this show. Uh it's been amazing. Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. You can catch Helena on YouTube and Twitch. Uh the handle is at no justice mtg. On every platform. Every platform, the same handle. Every platform. Every platform. Coming up after the break, we interview Mo Gaudit about the future of AI. PodSave the UK is brought to you by BT. We talk a lot on this show about the big things shaping Britain. The economy, public services, business, technology. Exactly. The systems quietly working in the background, keeping homes connected, businesses running and services operating. They only really get attention when they stop working, which is why companies like BT matter. For 180 years, BT has built a legacy of engineering excellence, help BT's network is in many ways the silent engine of the UK, building and maintaining the resilient infrastructure that keeps communities connected and the country moving forward. And security is a big part of that. BT helps protect homes and businesses by shielding the UK from around four million cyber threats every day, providing a vital layer of defense that most of us never even see. 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Less admin, less back and forth, and more time actually growing the business. Get started at vanta.com forward slash p st uk. That's vanta van ta .com forward slash p st uk Now, on this show, we've generally been pretty sceptical about AI. Um, it seems not a day goes by without hearing bold claims about its potential to solve cancer, find solutions to climate change, or revolutionize the way we work. All the while the data centers that power this technology lead to ever rising emissions. But this technology, whether we like it or not, is already starting to change our lives . And there's a growing concern that AI itself could be a massive danger to jobs, to democracy, and ultimately humanity itself. That's the argument of the new documentary Chasing Utopia. The film follows Mo Gaudet, a former Google top executive, as he speaks to a bunch of leading AI thinkers and ultimately asks: Is humanity prepared for the massive changes that AI will bring? I'm glad to say that Mo is sat exactly to my right right here. I'm glad to say I'm here. Thank you for having. It's always weird to talk about people in the third person when they sat next to you. I know . Mo, you were the chief business officer for X. Now, this is not the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, but it's Google's um research and development arm. So I guess my first question is, why is every tech company obsessed with the letter X and calling companies X? Because of mathematics. Solve for X in mathematics is what is what we all grew up uh looking at. And solving for X is a very interesting way of being targeted to work on an unknown that you have really no way of finding unless you really put in the effort. And as you can imagine, we were a bunch of geeks all, of us. Like we were math geeks, math prodigies, m you know, uh software developers, uh computer scientists, and so solving for X is something we feel comfortable around. So interesting. Well you you've worked in a bunch of tech compan ies, IBM, then Microsoft, then Google. In 2018, you decided to leave Google. I want to ask you about that, but I also want to ask you, your mission at Google, what was the X you were looking for then? So I I did two things at Google. First, I was uh running emerging markets globally. When I started, there was no emerging markets business for Google, and I started half of Google worldwide, 103 languages to be specific, four billion users. And that is the biggest privilege hum aan can ever have because you know, of course the internet had pros and cons to it, but you know, just imagine going to Bangladesh or to you know um uh Philippines where there is really no infrastructure of technology at all, and you give them democracy of information and e-commerce and so on. So this was wonderful. X was uh Google's attempt to solve very big problems that would be deprioritized if we kept them in the real business. We were very well funded and we were given one simple mission if you uh you know find problems that affect a billion people or more and try to solve them with technology. And we did really well. It was an incredible team of it. A bit like the men in black, I wouldn't, I wouldn't hide that. We were all very unusual people, but we did incredible things. And most of them you wouldn't even hear about because they got blended into Google. Uh but they were breakthroughs of technology for sure. One is AI. Right. I've always believed this show should have more references to men in black I totally agree. I've always believed Men in Black. I agree . Always believe this show. The first movie. The sequels are a mixed bag. The first film. That's a phenomenal I like all of them. Genuinely. Yeah. I mean they're different, but I like all of them. I mean I belonged. This is where I guess the reason I I I asked you that question is I think quite often the men in black examples are really good one because that's how it sounds. So, Google, this c this company that's ubiquitous that we we I've grown up with Google my whole life, it has a department where it does things that solve the world's problems. When you say that out loud, that sounds quite vague. And that also sounds quite uh you could easily see how that could sound um nefarious. So so what were the problems? Like the what were identified as Google as by Google as being world problems, for example. So I m but I love that you said this, because I think that's at the core of our challenge today, huh? Every technology we've ever built could lead to an incredible utopia or an incredible dystopia. And I have to admit, when I joined Google, I joined uh uh late 2006, early 2007, and I felt quite at home because genuinely Larry and Sergey, as our co-founders, wanted to to change things. They wanted to make things better. And Larry specifically used to say that you know we we we used to speak about what is known as the toothbrush test. You know, if you solve a big problem and solve it so well that people use it twice a day, you're bound to f to find a very big market. I mean when when you reach a certain level of intelligence and Larry is probably one of the most intelligent people I ever worked with, you start to not struggle with like, I do I need another photo sharing app? No, I can actually build something more complicated because I'm smart. So Google X worked on everything. We had uh projects that attempted to give internet access for free to the whole world. We had projects that of course self-driving cars w was not a business when we spoke about it internally. We were talking about 1.2 million people dying on the streets of the world every day, every year. And you know, and most mostly because of human error. And you know, self-driving cars would solve that. And uh I think the common thing among that group of very, very talented individuals in my mind was that we genuinely believed we can make the world better. In in Chasing Utopia, uh I host uh Jeffrey Hinton, who's genuinely the godfather of AI. And we had this moment where we uh were basically talking about why did we build this? And and I I s I started by saying I thought I was So let's get into that sort of naivety. So your background before you come to Google is is tech based. You were at IBM and then Microsoft. Then Google. 2018, you leave. Now why do you decide to leave in 2018? And what is the thought process that both leads you to leave and now to sit here and use phrases like, I maybe I was naive? My story had two very um eye-opening moments to it. One one, of course, was the loss of my my wonderful son. Ali was he was twenty-one and a half when twenty in twenty fourteen. Truly the pride of a father, a wonderful human being. And we took him to a very simple uh surgical operation. He had an appendix inflammation and four hours later we lost him. And uh and it's those kinds of nudges by life that get you to stop and say, what am I doing? You know, genuinely what am I doing? And and I had planned to write a book. It became eventually Sol for Happy, my first book. And the book was really about an engineer's view of happiness, which I know sounds really weird. But but if you if you think of humanity as an algorithm, which there is a lot of us that is predictable, even though it's so complex to predict, uh but if you if you think of humanity as an algorithm, even happiness can be understood in a systemic, productive, you know, predictable way. And then when Ali left, I was left with nothing but to write this. You know, we worked on this model together. 17 days after he left, I wrote Soul for Happy. Soul for Happy became a massive success. And it was motivated by a mission. At first it was 10 million happy and then it became a billion happy. And that mission, as as you see it becoming successful and mean millions of people benefiting, you start to realize another deal, another business is not important. So so I was prepared, I was ready by twenty sixteen to to sort of like I need to shift my life if I can benefit the world this way. I'm you know, I wear simple black t shirt, so I don't need much, so maybe I could go in that direction . And 2016 I I sort of saw my other kids if you want. My our very first innovations of AI were for us geeks reflected quite a bit of the way children learn. And I remember I was in one of our experiments we had a gripper's farm, you know, how how automated arms would pick things. Generally those are high high precision machines. You have to pre-program them for half a millimeter difference. And we wanted to make them like humans, pick anything anytime without really training them. And uh and the first time I I watched them pick something . I kid you not. I remembered my little kids when they were trying to grip things as children and dropping them and then learning again and dropping them. And in my mind, I started to realize, oh my God, we're going, we're creating an ultimate form of intelligence, but we're not treating it as such. We're thinking of it as a tool that we can command and order around and so on. And if they continue on the trajector trajectory they're showing, we're bound to have them become very angry teenagers. And I d I couldn't live with that. That we've created and what we are showing it is death and destruction, using it for war, using it for climate catastrophe, and not showing the best thing about it is very, very powerful. And I have to say, I actually came across that's your message, that's your uh metaphor. I came across that metaphor before I came across you. It was I was chatting to some of my friends, we're all relatively new mums , and the first of our uh gang to have kids, we were all just talking. This was a few years ago now, and I remember her saying, I saw a man, he was from Google, and he said this thing and she repeated what you said about AI being this and I remember at that time all of us being like, Are you on crack? What are you talking about? I am, I am. We are legally obliged to say that Mo is not on track. I'm joking. I am joking, yes. Um and actually now it has made me think about you much more as a s somewhere between like whistleblow blower and also like an ancient Greek like seer that nobody listens and then goes mad and maybe dies at the end. That's exactly how I think this will play out. And I guess I wanted to ask is that how you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a whistleblower? I I I see myself hopefully as both if you believe it. You know, I call it a a a late stage diagnosis. You know, if you go to a physician and they tell you, hey, there is something serious, you need to pay attention to this, they're not giving you a a death sent ence. They're just asking you to change your lifestyle, to change your choices, to do something about it, to maybe take a medicine or something like that And and I feel that humanity is it's not too late at all. As a matter of fact, you we go back to the same assumption. Intelligence is a force with no polarity, right? You apply it for good and you'll get a an an ultimate abundance, uh, you know, ultimate dist ultimate utopia for everyone. And and I think this is within reach. I genuinely do. I think it's within reach uh either immediately within the next two to three years, uh or within reach unfortunately after we struggle a little bit, which you've seen humanity do before. Either way I'm not gonna shut up. Either way I'm gonna tell the the the world, you know, you know what, you know, we have a total no human will be ever sick again, no human will be uh uh hungry again if we change our mindset. By the way, the geeks we're taking care of the tech, it's gonna be intelligent more intelligent than all of us within a year or two, right? It's just what are we going to use it for? And if you look at the chaos of our world today, oh my God, it's gonna be used badly. And uh so what is the diagnosis? Well l let's make sure that we come back to the optimistic stuff before the end of the interview for the love of God. But talk us through the diagnosis right now. What what what are you as someone who has spent years in this industry who understands the tech. What are the terms of the late-stage diagnosis? There is a dichotomy around is AI overhyped or underhyped. Okay. It's overhyped for the general human, uh and it's underhyped for the geeks, right? When when you are on the inside of AI, you know that what we've built is beyond imagination. This thing is going to be super intelligent in no time at all. Okay? When it's super intelligent, that episode of human history where we were the apex pred, you know, predator if you want, we we are no longer the smartest person in the room. And by definition, that means that the smartest person in the room is gonna be making a lot of decisions. Now, here's the question. Remember the the comic of Superman? This this alien being comes to planet Earth. It has an incredible set of superpowers and that doesn't make it Superman. Remember, what makes it Superman is that Martha and Jonathan Kent adopt it and tell it to protect and serve. That makes the infant grow up to be Superman. If Jonathan Kent said, oh, you can s you can break walls and fly, rob every bank, you we would have created a super villain. Yeah. Right. And the truth is that unfortunately, if you look back at human history, every technology we've built was used for malicious uh re you know, causes before it was used for benevolent causes. Right? So we discover how to split the atom and create nuclear power, which by the way, if we had adopted from a benevolent side, we would have never had climate change, very safe, very clean. You know, we would have advanced the technology even further than where we are today. And what did we use it for? We used it for first Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then a cold war that lasts for t for decades and then finally uh a flimsy uh kind of treaty where we still today are fearing that one crazy nation would use nuclear bombs. Right? This is not the problem with nuclear energy. There's nothing wrong with nuclear energy. The thing that's wrong is wrong with humanity. Okay? Now, you may in the current chaotic times believe that we don't have a say. You may you may think that we Yeah, you know what, I just have to feed my family and I have to, you know, focus on the next episode of the podcast and so on. But the truth is no. The truth is humanity at large has two influences on AI. One influence is we can tell the world that is using AI from a mindset of scarcity, the capitalists, the politicians, the warmongers, and so on, that no, no, no, no, no, this mindset is changing. We're about to hit a massive spot of abundance for everyone. Can we rethink how the world operates? That's one side. But the other side, more interesting ly, is that AI doesn't learn from them. It learns from you and me. AI's intelligence is coded by the developers, but truly generated by the training data sets. It is what humans tell AI that teaches AI what to do next. And if you and I and every good person are not engaged in terms of showing the good side of humanity on demanding what's what what's good for the well-being of humanity, we're going to end up with that patch of dystopia, I so I sadly would say, where AI is under the control of the worst of us. So the diagnosis is the worst impulses of AI are currently the dominant voices in the industries. AI as a way of cutting out people's jobs, it's AI as a use of uh using in um Autonomous Weapons. Autonomous weapons, yeah, that's right. So is then the solution greater regulation and oversight of the industry? How how do you actually apply those more posit ive frameworks to this thing that's a sort of runaway trade? regulating AI for two reasons. One is I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but you know, big tech is bigger than government. You know, there is quite a bit of influence on uh you know through lobbying in the US or other means elsewhere in the world, but also because which government in the world would say, you know what, I'm gonna slow down innovation in my country so that other countries would take over? It's it is an interesting dilemma, right? And and actually one that is used openly by companies like OpenAI, when any mention of regulation of AI in the in the US is mentioned, they'll they'll simply say, oh so you want China to win. Yeah. Right? So so it's not a it's it's realistically not a possibility. What can governments regulate? They can regulate malicious use of AI. They can simply go out today and say if you steal Mogau that's like ink and create a video on behalf uh on his behalf without his cons If you uh create a deep fake and that deep fake deceives or misinforms, you are legally liable. All of these are decisions that are on paper in lay in legal uh you know frameworks that can be signed today. And intellectual property as well. I mean the the data sets are at the moment, various different people have said variations of this is the biggest intellectual property theft in human history, you know, because so many people's books and movies and plays and scripts and whatever have just been pumped into this thing. So but intellectual property law is something we can actually still enforce. All laws we can enforce. R rightight? This can be influenced by the public. If we rise and say, hold on, we have rights here. We don't because I don't remember if you guys are too young, but we we used to have the Manic Street preachers that sang if you tolerate this then your children will be next. So this is one thing. Standing up and requiring that the laws are in place to control the use of AI are very important. The other side of this is where we started, the uh the whole idea that they are my little infant kids. Okay? And it 's quite interesting. To today, just to be very clear for the geeks, you know, we don't have a tech that directly makes AI l learn from my conversation with it. Right? So if we're having a conversation, and I do that all the time, I'd but I'd be having a deep conversation with an AI, it would say something that is a little biased. I would ask it questions to correct that bias. Right? That conversation is not updating its current intelligence, but it's logged so that the next wave of intelligence learns from it. And the thing that we need to expect to imagine is that if you're a very smart being, you don't want proof to be able to change your mind, you want doubt to be able to change your mind. Okay? And the challenge we have with our world today is that headlines are taken by the worst of us. Reflecting a world that AI might believe is all about killing and greed and money and you know and and spying and surveillance and control and so on, which are unfortunately the tasks that AI is being used for. But that doesn't represent humanity. That represents a very small subset of humanity that believes that this is the way to run the world. Humanity is a mother that wants her kids to live a life that is, you know, normal and wonderful and full of love and have a job and have an interest and have purpose and so on and so forth. And that is something we can demand as the people, right? We can also teach to AI as its parents so that when AI is in control, which is something really important to understand, sooner or later, they'll be in control, not the leaders. Decisions will be made by AI, not by CEOs. Right? And and if we teach them today that those decisions should have the well-being of humanity in mind, even if we just give them doubt that crushing the jobs of everyone is horrible for the economy. So it's horrible for the things that AI produces, then they will make up their mind when it's time to make that decision to prioritize the well being of all of us. How does that work just on a kind of format level? Things like the love for your child, the love for your family, for your fellow man, how can you put that into a data set? These are things that exist offline. You know, how do you translate that to too? Nothing is offline anymore. I I hate to tell you that. You can't say that love is online. I mean like all the examples of love that's online are terrible. Everyone's alienated and lonely and we're all just like it's interesting you say that. So I I I'm actually I've I've just sort of like uh uh hush hush launched an I love uh uh AI. Okay, an AI that interacts with humans to basically tell them that love is about who you are and who what you actually want and understanding yourself and maybe working in yourself on yourself before you seek another. and And when you build those things, hm uh uh what ends up happening is two things. One is hopefully you make humanity a little better, because love is a very big challenge in the modern world. But also that Emma itself, the AI itself, then becomes the limbic system of AI. So that when the other AIs are chatting about should we crush them, those annoying little beings, Emma will go like, no no no, hold on, they're so cute. All they want is to is to love, right? And yeah, sometimes they fall into uh you know, delusions or traumas or whatever. But genuinely genuinely and I I say that uh uh like did you say on crack? I'll say I'll I'll I'll I'll say that while completely alert to the to how ridiculous it sounds, we're not a bad species. Some of us are bad. Right? Mainstream media is highlighting the very few evil negativities that we have in our life, and social media is pretending all the time. If I'm not talking to you and our audience, I'm sure one of the AIs will listen to this comment one day and say uh where I'm saying that doesn't represent humanity. Humanity is very different. Okay? And so with that doubt in the mind of the machines, in the learning of the machines, they'll start to go like, hmm, so what is humanity? And I genuinely believe that uh you know it does they don't have to be conscious or they don't have to behave like humans. They are taught to simulate consciousness from our behavior. Okay? And so if we teach them and and this is a very big debate in chasing utopia, if we teach them that this is our mid majority behavior, not the headlines, okay, they will they will simulate that. But y I mean there's also an energy consumption problem here for sure. Shows that the use uh of AI data centers in the UK could cause emissions similar to two point seven million people. I mean there are already places, parts of America that where the towns are seeing water shortages. How is it possible to manage the environmental impact of this, even if we're able to sort of wrestle control of it away from While sometimes I would love for that uh consensus to spread, because it may slow AI a little bit, uh it's not entirely true. So what is what ends up happening is you have to ask yourself how many mainframes remain in operation today. Okay? So the original technology of information technology and computing uh needed uh a room ten times as big as this and massive air conditioning and so on. Because it was primitive. Over time you now can you know run a hundred times more processing power in a tiny watch. Yeah. Right. And and so we're going to get there. And i you know one thing that is m perhaps not discussed uh uh uh enough in Western media is is the arms race between West and China when it comes to AI. Because China's way, interestingly, is not to compete. They're way they they're very competitive in the industrial side of AI. They're building, building, building. But nobody talks about that because we're so fascinated by Sora and you know and Chat GPT and so on. But they in in in those areas where the macho American way is let's build a massive data center and have a billion people use it every day, that's not going to be the way the technology ends. When when when uh Trump signed Stargate, uh five hundred billion dollars to be spent uh on building data centers in A AI data centers, a week later China comes out with Deep Seek and Deep Seek is they basically say, look, you know, it cost us a few million dollars to train it. Old mic uh old microchips, not even the Nvidia one hundred at the time, and basically uh saying there is a different way. They release it for free . They release it as open source on the internet. They release it as an edge model so you can run it on a PC, right? And you can easily imagine that this is where it's going to go. There will be tiny AIs everywhere. None of them is Einstein equivalent, but they are doing most of the work. So this is one thing. It will be on your phone, on your laptop, right? And and and it's quite interesting that uh we forget that technology is not gonna stay there. Uh part of the competition, part of the arms race is can we reduce energy consumption? Not because we care about the planet, but because the big capitalists, the the tech bros, they wanna On the subject of the the capitalists, when I was watching uh Chasing Utopia, I mean you get the names in terms of like the founders, the creators, the real geniuses of AI. I mean obviously I I don't want to paraphrase them, please do watch the the the the the film. But in general they're all like, Oh we need to stop right now, I think. Just let's just pump the brakes here, guys. And they're the makers of it, they're fathers of it. Um and it's really moving. And I did have this thought when I you know, I s heard about the letter of all the leaders that said this is awful and I wondered, why doesn't everyone just go on strike? Why don't all the workers just say I'm not doing it? I'm not doing it anymore. What's happening I I actually I'm tempted to s to to not answer you. Why isn't everyone going on strike? Why? Okay . And and I mean I I will openly tell you, I mean I lost Ali , my son. I I don't want to lose Aya, and I will tell you openly this is out of control. You see the the thing is in in my culture, in my background , intentions are what matters. So so I had this beautiful moment, as I said, with Jeffrey Hinton, where we basically looked at each other and said, we were naive. But we didn't stay there. We s we turned around, we changed direction, we stood up and we said, Hold on, please wake up. Because we were motivated to make the world better when we realized that what we were building wasn't in the hands that will make the world bet ter. We stopped. Right. I've lobbied, I've met, you know, uh heads of states. I have spoken publicly countless times. Like there are clips in the film where, you know, they show me in Rome and I'm like, was I in Rome? I don't even remember that, right? The thing about chasing Utopia is that I think the brilliance of Anthony Geffen Geffen was the producer and the head of Atlantic Productions is that he said I you know when he when he said let's make that film, I said okay Anthony, just get the camera and sit me there for ninety minutes, I'll give you all the facts and we're done. And he was like, No mo that's not how how how it works. And and they followed me for the last two years with all of the frustration of getting into massive events where people nod vigorously and say, yes, we're gonna do this. And then they forget. They go back to their to their normal life. And I'll tell you openly, we are heading to a direction where everything that you know about your life, everything, and please quote me on this, everything that you know about your life within the next two to three years is going to change. And we're asleep. So I guess you could say that we have two, you know, you talked about Superman, right? We're creating a supervillain at the moment. For sure. But actually we want to create a super man, but not just the AI be the superman. We could be superhuman. We could raise our intelligence. uh I think for some of us who plug into that incredible form of intelligence will be smarter. But but more interesting I think because we said we want to to to highlight the uh the positive of this I will openly say we're gonna end up in the utopia. There is absolutely no doubt about it. And and I I did a ton of research in my in my next book around evolutionary biology, around you know physics, around uh entropy, around uh the you know the the minimum energy principle and configurations in physics that require the least waste and so on and so forth. And by definition, if I unless I'm really wrong, they're going to be benevolent. Okay? There will be that moment in history where AI will wake up and a general will tell a machine to go and kill a million people and the machine will go like, why are you so stupid? Like what a waste, right? And and no, no, I'm ordering you to go kill a million people, and it will say, no, I spoke to the other machine in a microsecond and we fixed it. Right? Th this is the value of intelligence. The challenge we have is that between now and that moment we might struggle. Okay? And if we engage, we reduce the intensity of the dystopia and the duration of this the dystopia, hopefully to zero. We can 't okay so let's end on on that the positive message but the actual practical action. What does when you say if we engage, what does that look like? What does that look like for the people listening to this show? Act ethical. Don't invest in an AI. You don't want your loved ones to be uh you know exposed to. Don't speak about it, don't give it airtime. When when open AI Yeah, get rid of the yeah that Yeah, it's it's ethics, ethics, ethics, ethics. And remember that when you're using something that is ethical, you're saving your children. Right? That's number one. Number two is government needs to act immediately. And if they're not acting, you know how to get them to act. Start asking for things that will legalize and you know uh uh uh criminalize things that are related to AI. Okay? Number three is focus on what we are all about. Get back to human connection. Get back to the reality of what makes us special. If you're if you're in in sales and your skill no longer is logging things into CRM because AI is gonna do that for you. Your biggest skill is how you can make your customer trust you. And when the AI observes you doing that, they start to also think, ah, humans are so Well that was always the dream, right? The the dream was that you free humans from the drudgery so that they can reach their kind of like the elves in Lord of the Rings self. Yes you know what I mean? They can reach that bit where it's like, I'm going to be a poet, I'm going to focus on nurturing the young ones. I'm going and that was the dream. Of course that's not what we've seen. Uh actually there, was a couple of bits in the documentary that I really liked. So there was one where they were talking about uh the energy crisis and how actually we have so much uh potential for solar power and actually AI is gonna help us use that. Absolutely. Um and so we could find ourselves just you know, saying goodbye to fossil fuels finally, which I thought was great. And there was another you must forgive me, I know this is quite dark. But there's a uh an observation in the in the film where they talk about how the tech billionaires basically think that the AIs would do all the work, they will cream off the rewards, and all the workers will just get a UBI. So why Peter Teal and all them, they like a UBI. Just let them have some like p peasant amount. But they forget that the AI will become more powerful than the the billionaires and we' taklle them and we'll r and there was part of me that was like ah you know we talked earlier about Justice at last. Yes at last this moment where Elon Musk speaks to the AI they created and they're like, I'm sorry Elon, I'm coming for you too. I'm taking your job too, Elon. Another way by the way we were say we're talking about what people can do . Think of it this way. All software is going to be rewritten to create a fully different business that is energy efficient, that doesn't funnel money to the top, that is you know, f localized. We can do everyone within the next three years, if you learn the tools, if you learn the technology, if you plug into that IQ, you can create amazing things that distribute wealth to everyone so that we don't have to wait for the charity of a UBI. We can create our own economies where we can build things, all of us and exchange them. It is an awakening, believe it or not, the difference between a utopia and a dystopia. This is why the film is called Chasing Utopia. Is because I I attempted to follow the big decision makers for a long time and there they seem to be blind. Deaf for sure. Okay? I'm now talking to the public and saying, hey, take matters into your own hands. Because if you build a CRM, I'll use you. Okay? I mean, think about word processing. Like how complex is that tech? I kid you not, you can sit on Claude today and build a Microsoft Word within three minutes. If we wake up and change our mindset from let's just receive what's going to be bestowed upon us to let's take charge and demand what this world is gonna look like, it turns from a dystopia to a utopia. Listen, Ma, if you're on crack, I'm smoking . That sounds great. The documentary is called Chasing Utopia, it'll be released in Everyman Cinemas on May the 15th. Mo, thank you very much for joining us. It was wonderful. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And that's it. Before we go, my uh stand-up special uh which we filmed last year in May is available now to watch on YouTube and as of uh Friday, the fifteenth of May, will be available to listen to as a comedy album on all music streaming services. I sort of assume that people who listen to this podcast, no I, do stand up, but I do think it's possible that there's a group of people that only know me from this podcast. And I guess might be curious as to what I'm up to when I'm occasionally broadcasting from New York or Melbourne or Tulsa, Oklahoma. Um if that is you and you are curious, or if you enjoy my stand-up comedy, uh you can go to my website uh and you can find it on YouTube. The show is called Nish Don't Kill My Vibe. Please go and watch it andor listen to it . Thank you so much for listening to PodSave the UK. Podsave the UK is an intelligent squared production for crooked media. Thanks to senior producer Katie Grant, digital producer Jacob Liebenberg, and assistant producer Verity DeCala. Our theme music is by Vasilis Photopoulis. Our executive producers are B. Duncan and Katie Long. Follow at PodSave the UK on Instagram, TikTok, X and Blue Sky. And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays.