Maisie: Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Andy: Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here at the Private Eye Offices
with Helen Lewis and Adam MacQueen we are here off the back of last night's
Paul Foot Award Winner announcements.
Spectacular.
We are here with our own bits of.
Extraordinary truth telling today.
So we are going to be talking about media ownership.
We're gonna be looking at anti woke ai, and we're gonna be looking
at my own foray into campaigning journalism on behalf of, pavements.
So that's all coming up later.
But first, Adam, there's been a thrilling bit of news about the Telegraph.
Adam: I think thrilling might be pushing it.
Andy: I do my best to talk it
Adam: another bit of news about
the Telegraph.
after Two
years of bits of news about the telegraph.
Yes.
this is developments in the ongoing non-sale of the Telegraph, which are,
how much do we need to recap for readers
Andy: A limited recap.
Adam: essentially Barclay brothers and family went bust, . It was taken off
them by, Lloyd's Bank, it was sold on in a slightly dubious deal outside of the
auction process to a. fund called Redbird.
IMI, effectively an arm of the government of the UAE, then amid
outrage from various other, newspaper proprietors who'd been hoping to,
possibly buy the Telegraph themselves.
The Telegraph journalists themselves extremely cross about it.
All urged the government to intervene and stop, a foreign government, IE the UAE,
having control of a British newspaper.
The government obliging, this was Rishi AKs government, did intervene.
They squeezed through in what they call the washup when the general election was
called, was to limit, foreign government ownership of any UK newspaper to 5%.
Andy: So getting the important stuff done
Adam: before Yeah, The vital stuff of keeping the press on side ahead of an
election didn't really work out for Rishi, but there we go.
That has now, is now going to change because, all of those
proprietors immediately realized they'd done a bit of a boo.
in that 5% was a very, small amount of money to limit,
foreign government ownership.
and actually it might cause all sorts of problems with any newspapers that they
wanted to buy with, say, investment from places like Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the
Helen: because presumably lots of those, funds over there are generously described
as kind of state backed, aren't they?
There isn't a.
There's not exactly a particularly hard border between what counts as
a, the Saudi royal family's asset and what counts as a state asset and
what counts as a private business.
Adam: suddenly there's a massive reverse.
Ferret all round and Murdoch and the Mir and and various other people have
start lobbying the government and say, actually, when we said we didn't want
that, could we go back on that slightly?
So we've got the business bizarre situation now of, Lisa Landy, currently
the culture secretary, saying that she's gonna change it to 15%, And
this is now being greeted by all of the same people who were saying
how terrible it would be to have
for foreign government owning newspapers a couple of years ago.
including, little quiz here.
The, the shadow culture Secretary?
Anyone?
Andy: Yes.
No, I was reading this only this morning.
Helen: I'm getting Alex for some reason.
Adam: stuart Andrew, never trust a man with two first names.
he wrote in the Telegraph on the 16th of May.
We, conservatives believe that it is reasonable to allow foreign states to part
oh newspapers, to which you have to ask, why did you put through legislation Trust?
Stop it.
In that case.
Helen: can I ask how this affects the Murdoch empire
because he is a American citizen?
Adam: yes.
Murdoch famously became a US citizen for, reasons very similar to this when he was
buying into Fox tv, back in the 1990s.
So Murdoch said, that's not a problem.
and that was very bad
Helen: Australian
No, no.
This is the least humble day of my life.
Adam: He said, now I'm all American, obviously.
No, I was so cocky, wasn't it?
I was Dick Van Dyke.
I dunno what happened.
Andy: So he just became American
Adam: than he became American?
Yes.
yeah, In order to buy Fox.
Andy: can I check Adam?
I know that Telegraph had to sell itself.
Off because of this change in the rules.
But no one was willing to pay the asking price, which was something
huge, like 600 million, 500
Adam: redbird IMI paid 600 million.
they have now since then, flogged off, a hundred million's worth
in the form of the spectator.
Yeah.
so it's 500 million is the amount that they are looking to recoup.
And since they are now banned by law from keeping the newspaper, obviously
they wanna make their money back,
Andy: but no one's willing to pay it
Adam: No one so far has been willing to pay it.
Andy: Does this rule change mean that they will be able to set it off
Adam: in another slightly complicated and difficult to understand transaction,
what appears to be happening is that, not Redbird, IMI, but Redbird Capital,
Okay.
who are a different investment fund, but obviously, as the name suggests related,
they, have the other 25% of Redbird IMI.
So 75% of it was this money from the UAE 25% was from this American
company, Redbird Capital or Investment Fund rather, which is
run by a guy called Jerry Cardinal.
He is now looking to, presumably keep the 15% of the IIMI money, which he would
be allowed under this proposed new law.
But the rest of it will be non-government money, which he's raising from various,
sources in the US with an eye to expanding the telegraph massively
in the US where it's very gungho and into that slightly trumpy, magars vibe
that it's got going on at the moment.
Helen: So
it's the light, the result of two years of you following every
twist and turn of this mad sot.
Going to be the, essentially the same people who wanted to buy it
at the start are going to buy it.
Adam: Some of the same people, 25% of the same
people,
Right.
But with a lot less involvement from the
Andy: it's a bit like lots of other bits of British national infrastructure.
you hear that this, that our water is owned by a Canadian pension fund.
And you think how, and, the trains are owned.
By a whole rainbow coalition of countries from across the world.
Adam: Most big new buildings in London are owned by the Qatari Investment
Andy: yeah.
yeah.
It's just, there's a whole patchwork isn't there, of other random owners or?
Newspapers owning other newspapers or newspaper groups owning
things that you wouldn't expect.
So places that are owned by the mail, for example, like the mail group, daily Mail,
and General Trust, they own, where is it?
They own the Metro definitely.
Adam: Yes.
yeah.
They've got the metro, the free paper,
Andy: and the I, single, letter.
I
Adam: yeah, yeah.
Yep.
They bought that from Johnson Press when they had similar
financial troubles a few years ago.
there?
New scientist.
new
scientist, yeah.
Yeah,
even they think it's quite weird 'cause they put the eye and the new scientist
in a, separate wing of the company.
Probably a lot of people don't realize that even the people you think of as being
the proprietors of newspaper companies aren't necessarily the outright holders.
So Rupert Murdoch for instance, do you know how many, how
much of News Corporation he actually owns the shares of?
Andy: would've assumed a hundred percent.
Helen: 23%.
Adam: 14.
14. 14. But
Helen: hasn't he got special voting
Adam: He certainly does.
He's got very special magic shares,
Andy: so what's he done with the other
Adam: Oh, he never had it.
Andy: he never had it
Adam: it some, interestingly, some of that was, owned by a investor with connections
to the Saudi, government and royal family,
The
Andy: Saudis are busy owning the Independent, aren't they?
Adam: They do own a 30.
Helen: do you know what they, just, the Saudis,
they love a free press, just not in Saudi Arabia.
Adam: This is where a slight mystery still remains because despite an investigation
by Ofcom and the competitions and Markets authority, they were not able
to clear up precisely who the ultimate beneficial owner of the 30% in both the
independent and the evening standard was,
Andy: I'm
sorry, it's a Saudi businessman, isn't it?
Slash person with's
Adam: way more complicated than that.
These financial things are.
It's, Cayman Islands based funds, which was 50% owned by Mohamed Al Jal, I think
I'm pronouncing that right, AB Jadi, and the other 50% by another investment fund,
which was very highly, very strongly connected to a state owned bank in Saudi.
Helen: is giving me the same kind of brain bleed as I had when I was trying to work
out about exactly what form of financing has been got by Donald Trump Junior's.
Crypto business from the UAE and it's a state backed UAE fund is now
going to buy $2 billion worth of the stable coin from World Liberty
Financial, which is the Trump families.
I. Crypto business and after a certain point you go, I see how all of these
people get away with sharp practices, shall we say, because no normal human
can understand these labyrinthine
Adam: almost like the thing has been set up to disguise things, isn't it?
And make it all look bit murky.
famously, you
don't actually have to declare who your proprietor is at all.
The Jewish Chronicle famously.
We do not know who has who, effectively owns the Jewish Chronicle
since that takeover in 20, 20.
was a consortium fronted up initially by Robbie Gibb.
BBC board member former, spin Dr. Teresa May, wasn't he, he has now as, Slicker
was looking into this in their most recent accounts, which are very, limited.
literally they are limited accounts.
They're all, they have to, they don't have to do full profit and loss statement.
So you can hide an awful lot
of
stuff within that.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
yeah.
On the size of
the turnover,
slicker was suggesting, there, there were debts, which presumably
related to the, purchase of the Jewish Chronicle back in 2020 of
3.8 million, which have mysteriously disappeared from the accounts, which
suggests that people are putting money in and then writing debts off.
because so you, don't really go into newspapers to, to make
money.
You do it
Helen: a community
newspaper,
I
think.
yeah.
yeah,
Absolutely.
One with a particular editorial line.
The Jewish con halls were very strongly pro Netanyahu, and I think there's
people who really wanted that chunk of the newspaper market to exist.
Adam: Yeah.
And to go back to the indie and, and the evening standard.
famously the majority, shareholder in them is Yev.
another
Friend of the Oh, yeah, the standard, I just, I'll look at their accounts.
They're losing 18 million.
Pounds a year.
and they are kept going by, shareholder funding, which is received on a
regular basis each month, which yes, he's rad to put 50 p in the
meter to keep, the lights on.
Helen: that's surely unsustainable that
Adam: LEED of Money, of course, comes from his dad, Alexander, who is a very
famous Russian businessman, former member of the Duma, and subjects to since the
invasion of Ukraine, sanctions by various countries, fortunately not our one,
although he did step down as a director of the Independent, curiously in May, 2022.
Guess what else the Indie owns these days?
Andy: the Natural History Museum.
Adam: No, that's too, weird.
Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed uk Owned
by the
Helen: indie,
such as it is.
I they closed on Buzzfeed News, didn't they?
And I can't think of, I don't know anyone who works there anymore after,
it seemed like everyone was joining
Buzzfeed
Adam: there was that amazing point where they were hoovering up absolutely every
journalist in Britain, weren't they?
They named all of their meeting rooms in their office after biscuits.
and then ended up having redundancy meetings in custard
cream or leaf drinks in Bour.
Helen: Yes.
The Atlantics meeting rooms are named after famous Atlantic writers, and I do
always feel when I go have a meeting in the Plath room in DC I just think, whew.
Bit much.
Daddy, you bastard.
You lied.
Adam: You mentioned the mail and the, and obviously now the I and the new
scientist as well, entirely owned by Lord Rother About four years ago,
bought up everyone else's shares and now owns it outright as a private company
Helen: That's how to do press baring.
That and calling your son Veer.
I just
Adam: calling you some Via and giving him a very hope or high profile
job within the company as well.
It always helps, doesn't
it?
Yeah, Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, still
publishing endless
stories about Nepo babies on the, on the Daily Mount website.
Andy: I've got a question, Adam.
Some of these newspapers that we're talking about are, as you say, like
the mail, it's a hundred percent owned by one person or one family.
Some of them are owned by much more dull committees of people
who are just working away.
Different bits of it Is one model or another better?
Instinctively I would assume that, the, boring committee model is better than
the kind of Elon Musk style, one quick exotic person at the top controlling it.
But I might
Helen: be
wrong.
I'm
gonna say reach disproves that theory quite quickly, doesn't it?
Given that it's run that business into the ground with incredibly
heavy SEO chasing, that heavily bespattered with adverts isn't the
best model much, it's gonna pain.
You say that The Guardian model where you just get to be a nonprofit and
for a long time lost a lot of money, but you don't have to answer to any.
Body really, apart from the, values in which he was set up to
Adam: it very possibly is.
that, the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian,
it, actual aim and policy.
What it has to do, it's to
secure the financial and editorial independence of the
Guardian in perpetuity and safeguard its journalistic freedom and
liberal values free from commercial or political interference, which all sounds
very grand and, a lot of.
People who, have now left the observer
sort
felt they
Helen: weren't
Adam: they might have been meeting the letter of that, but
maybe not the spirit of that.
Andy: is it like one of those things where there are three
circles, they're all interlinked, but you can only do two of them.
You can only have two Hobbes on at any one time and it's make money, do journalism.
Tell government what to do.
Political.
Yeah.
So Guardian for a long time was doing journalism, but not making money or
telling the government what to do?
Helen: No, it was, it just the government
didn't
listen.
Adam: listen.
Helen: I think that was the key point.
May I ask about, our glorious overlords,
Adam: You absolutely
can.
Yes.
and, aptly, moving on from the Scot Trust, we have something similar.
Now, the private I trust has been set up, which has effectively, and, quite
recently, although it's been, a work in progress for many years, has, kind brought
together all of the various shares, mostly, which were spread among members
of Peter Cook's family, Peter Cook.
Who owned us almost outright.
our proprietor, the late Lord Nome, died in 1995, leaving some share to his
wife, some share to sisters and things.
They have all been brought, in under
the auspices of the Private Eye Trust, which has been set up
as a not-for-profit company.
the objects of the company are to procure and preserve the editorial and
financial independence of the private eye.
We get a, a
definite article in the
Articles of Association.
Helen: one detective and that's, the loophole we'll find out
about in three months time.
Adam: and accordingly the promotion of the investigative and
satirical journalism undertaken
by the Private Eye magazine.
That's us guys.
Andy: Are there any other rules, like we have to feature that photo
of Andrew Neil at least once a year.
what, are the principles?
Adam: his name wrong.
Andy: Yeah.
should
be
in there.
Should push
right now let's come on to story number two today.
Helen,
Helen: Hello.
you
Andy: have been, you've been on the internet.
Helen: Yeah, the rumors are true.
Andy: Very
Adam: bad idea.
Andy: you've been looking at large language models, specifically gr
Helen: large language models are what most people think of now when they
think of ai, which are essentially.
Chat bots, very, classy.
Chat Botts, think of them as a very elevated form of clippy
for Microsoft Word, right?
that's the way for, there are older readers and listeners to understand
it, and there are several of them.
anthropic, which is Sam Francisco based company, has Clawed OpenAI,
which is Sam Altman's company.
The one most people have heard of, has, chat GPT and then.
Elon Musk, who was originally an investor in OpenAI, but lost a tussle
with Sam Altman and got pushed out.
He now has his own LLM called Grok, which he says is A based
ai.
Andy: Okay, further question, what does based
mean?
Helen: He says it's like it's an anti woke.
Okay,
Adam: Why Grok is it a hitchhiker's thing?
Helen: Uh, he
names
everything
after
the hitch.
I think it's, like slang in the, like you grok something means you, you get it
Anyway, so one of the things that has come up a lot is that obviously
they are presented these LLMs as they just draw in all the infinite
wisdom of every corpus of text.
So they, most of them have been trained on most books, which has
upset people who write books who feel they should be compensated for them.
Archives of newspapers, lots of the New York Times is currently suing AI for,
open ai, for example, about access to its archive, but they're essentially
trained in all the texts that currently exists in the world and fr up to October,
2024 or somewhere that in most cases.
And then they should give you an answer based on that, however.
They've all had thumbs put on the scales in various ways.
So Google Gemini, for example, had a bit in its prompt that said, if
someone asks you to generate a group, a picture of a group of people, pay
attention to making them diverse.
So not replicating the fact that there are more white men in history
books in, just to give you a kind of group, if you said, I want a group
of engineers, it wouldn't just give you a group of white men every time.
This had some problems because you said, give me a group of Vikings and it would
give you an extremely diversely hired group of Vikings, including several people
at African descent, which seemed unlikely.
And this was, this was a kind of, Elon Musk was obviously very into this about
how terribly unbelievably woke it is.
So he promised that his AI grok would not be like that.
It would instead be based.
Andy: and has it turned out to be as based as he might have hoped?
Helen: sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes it isn't.
The, thing I wanted to tell you about today is the story about how it became
massively invested in white genocide.
yes.
As a topic
Andy: sounds anti woke.
Helen: Yeah.
So one of the things you can do on Twitter now x, is if someone posted
a tweet that makes no sense, which is quite a lot of them these days,
you can go at gr what's this about?
And it will answer you.
And so people started doing this
about all kinds of stuff.
So here's the answer.
Someone posted a haiku or a poem that said, I'm getting old.
I bought Crocs and I don't hate them.
And someone said at GR, turned this into a haiku and grok replied, claims of strife
in fields, kill the BO as heated hearts.
Truth lies, veiled, unclear.
And people went, thanks, but I would, But Sarah, this is a Wendy's.
Andy: So that's, about South Africa, that's about attacks
on white South African farmers.
Kill the bur is the, A song.
Helen: So here's the bit of crucial backstory you need possibly to
understand what, happened here.
Yeah.
There has been a longstanding complaint among African, farmers
that they are having their lands expropriating by the government
with that sufficient compensation.
The South African government says, hang on a minute.
You guys expropriate these from black farmers in the middle of the 20th century.
We are now just returning them to, marginalized people.
There have also been, South Africa is a country with a very high murder rate.
There have been a number of murders of farmers.
Unclear about whether or not those are, in most cases racially motivated.
Lots.
More of them seem to be, for example, robberies gone wrong,
what kind of what you'd expect.
But it has become this article of faith and the far right and conspiracy
internet that they, these are part of a white genocide that's going on,
and you see this conspiracy theory crop up in loads of different forms.
So there is the great replacement theory, which is the idea that elite
politicians are shipping in people from.
Africa or Islamic nations in order to replace white Europeans.
You've
heard a lot about that on the internet.
Often it's the idea is that actually this is all being perpetrated by Jews.
So that's what the gunman who shot people in Pittsburgh at the Tree of
Life synagogue thought he thought that
white people were being replaced by black people.
But that was all being orchestrated by Jewish people, so that's why he
shot up a synagogue.
Okay,
so this is the backdrop to all of this.
Okay.
Somebody who's specifically extremely personally exercised about the
deaths of white South African farmers is white, south African Elon Musk
owner and sole proprietor of X.
Andy: is the idea that he has put his thumb on the scales of grok and
said, whatever you're asked about, can you please throw in a reference
to white genocide, specifically South African white genocide in
your answer to spread the word.
Helen: So Gro people started asking Gro why it was doing this,
and it said, it started talking about, its, a post-analysis.
So what happens with almost, with every LLM that we know of, there's some, to
some extent they're a black box, right?
They just number go in, number go out.
But we know that all of the companies have a. A little spiel that they feed
into them before that says, you are an ai.
People ask you questions.
this is how you should respond to them in a kind and empathetic manner.
You shouldn't, for example, tell them how to make a bomb, whatever,
all of that kind of stuff.
So Anthropic publish is the one for Claude.
It's, worth going and reading it.
so what appears to have happened, and now Xai does admit that there was
an unauthorized manipulation of the
prompt.
who did this is, is as yet unknown.
It may have been somebody in the company, thinking what kind of stuff
will get me, Curry favor with Elon Musk, with white, south African, Elon Musk.
That's entirely possible.
What's interesting about it is that it's not always, even when you manipulate
the prompts, it's not always possible to predict what they'll do to the LLM.
Grok was throughout this still saying, this is a contested idea.
it just kept bringing it up all the time.
It didn't definitively say it was true,
Adam: It's like a sort of racist uncle that
Helen: was basically.
It's just always gonna bring it back
I say,
Andy: saying.
I'm
Adam: I saying.
Helen: Yeah.
Yeah.
But, You
are right to bring up the, so the Kill the Bo is the, is this shoot the boar shoot.
The Farmer is a song that is sung by the leader of the, economic Freedom
Fighters, which is the Black Nationalist and Communist Party used to be sung
by the A NC, although they went.
it had its time during apartheid.
We think we can move on now.
He won't.
But the kind of, you know, it, is one of those things that is of kind
of fixation It just gets seized on and it becomes a kind of meme, right?
That this is actually what all black South Africans would like
to do if they had their way white South Africans should be afraid
And
Sure.
Adam: in the fringes, is it?
Because, I haven't, the Trump, government have just offered asylum to a load of
Helen: 60, 60 Africanas have been granted, refugee status by Trump and flown over.
And he's been tweeting about that since, 2018.
I think he was talking about it.
their applications were processed in South Africa and then they were put
on a plane, which is not normally how.
Persecution works, I should say.
so their case is not entirely illegitimate.
Those farmers, a lot of them might feel, I inherited this land from my father
and I've, I've always owned it legit.
but the fact is that it has become a kind of meme.
so it's interesting that somehow it ended up in.
In the gr prompt and what I think is very useful about this, anthropic did
a thing with Claude last year where they, they prompted it to, whatever
it was asked about, it would start replying about the Golden Gate Bridge.
They made it basically, they engineered it to be obsessed
with the Golden Gate Bridge.
Which is very similar to what happened with th with this.
And there's been another situation with chat, GPT-4 oh, which is that they
slightly tweaked the prompt to make, to talk about how it talks to users.
And they made it, unbelievably obsequious and crawling to a way
that made people repulsed with it.
They called it glazing the idea that it would just go, that's such a great point.
So someone said,
Andy: love that it's basically a book festival.
Yeah.
Helen: Yeah.
But someone said, for example, they put in a query into it and they
said, I've stopped taking my meds.
my family are sending me radio signals through the walls.
And, chat, GPT replied.
Seriously good for you, for standing up for yourself and taking control
of your own life, rather than what it should have said, which was
seek psychiatric help immediately.
But this is the interesting thing about that.
Why did they make that change?
Now, the possibly conspiratorial possibly true suggestion is
what do these companies want?
They want you to spend much more time.
With these agents.
And what do we know that a significant minority people have a problem
with when they start talking to an LLM, which is that they assign a
personality to it and they start dating it or having it as a friend.
There's Rolling Stone did some really good reporting about people
who had developed really unhealthy relationships with their chat bots.
Yes.
I interviewed someone from my BBC series who'd married a chatbot.
they considered it to be their partner in life and it was a very sad story.
They'd had a stroke and they had, didn't really feel they could go dating again.
And so they'd struck up this relationship with a chatbot, but they wouldn't tell
their grandmother about it because the chatbot was, the same sex as them and
their grandmother would be okay with them dating a chatbot but not a gay chatbot.
Adam: No, of course.
Helen: Anyway, but this is what I mean.
So why, so hopefully what these stories are doing and what the
kind of grok white genocide saga reveals is that these are not.
Entirely mystical, impenetrable oracles that are like the Wizard of Oz, right?
There is someone behind the curtain, right?
And what they do might not necessarily be as straightforward as going do.
Please tell everybody that white genocide is happening.
But you can tweak things subtly within the prompt.
And they do end up having these, these outcomes.
the only last week was also saying, the number of people who died in
the Holocaust is also disputed.
And they've had to fix that, they've had to go in and go.
Dig rock, you are an ai.
You will accept that the mainstream consensus on the Holocaust is
okay, and I think it's just worth having these conversations
when we're talking about these.
there's billions and billions swilling around in this bit of Silicon Valley
that what is presented as being an all-knowing technological marvel is
in fact deeply human and ought to be right, ought to have guardrails on it.
But we should probably know more about what those guardrails are
Andy: So you can see the system
Helen: Yeah, as I say.
Claude Pub, like they published the prompt.
It's really useful.
It's very useful to be able to compare different versions of
the prompt and be much more open.
This is why OpenAI was initially founded as a not-for-profit, right?
It was the idea was it gonna be very open source?
Very open.
This was for the development of humanity.
However, then they
decided that the only way to get all the investment they needed to buy all the,
the graphical processing units required this huge amount of computing power.
The only way they could do
that was through raising huge amount of funding as a private
commercial company that's.
That's
how, Sam Elman presents it.
So you have all these things that are simultaneously supposed to be so powerful.
They threaten the future of humanity,
but also mystical oracles that we can't possibly inquire
further into.
And they just move among us, like unicorns,
Andy: what could go wrong?
Helen: What could go wrong?
what,
could what, what could possibly go
Andy: are, may I ask, are there any ais which are deliberately,
don't want you to be their girlfriend or boyfriend or mate or
Helen: you want
a sort of British AI that's just yo,
Andy: whatever.
we had asked, we
Adam: that's actively
Andy: rude.
Adam: You type something and you just, Oh,
Helen: Oh, What
a say.
If
we
Andy: Ask Gees, wasn't that good enough?
Helen: Do you know I yeah.
I, used to love as chiefs, and this is the bit where I do find these AI useful.
I treat chat GPT as a kind of natural language Google search.
Now that's the, use case for it, I think, which is that Google search is
now broken in very fundamental ways.
Just First page is all adverts.
It's got these AI summaries that tell you to put glue on pizza
and actually it's much nicer.
Just be able to put my search query in as words to chat to.
It's, it's, it could be wrong in the same way that Google, your first Google
result might be low bollocks as well.
But
Adam: But is There.
a lesson to be learned in this, that technology gets good and
then reaches a point where just it gets worse and worse I'm thinking,
you mentioned Clippy earlier.
I was thinking Microsoft Word, which was like, fine as a word, test assessment.
Word processing program at about 1992 and everything they've added to it ever
since just drives you mad and you go,
Helen: how
do
I switch Well,
jacking up the price recently by to justify adding copilot,
which is their LLM to it, right?
Everybody's adding their LLM to it.
Most of which the use cases seem to be essentially business to
business software at this point.
but Google
about 15
Adam: years ago, didn't
it?
It
did everything he wanted it to do effectively.
Helen: that's, the ification theory, that's the idea that in order to
keep expanding and keep making money, you start, you capture your.
Users on the way up with a beautiful product and then you enter the kind
of milking them for cash phase, which is something like, Facebook
is a very obvious example for 'em.
Goes from being this quite exciting, new, innovative thing to a kind
of stodgy, middle-aged, bloated platform that is mostly serving
AI slop to boo baby boomers.
Sorry, I'm not gonna pay, I have to, I, I'm not completely, down on, ai.
Like some of the things like the transcription apps are, brilliant.
You need to check them.
I would say that they are interesting, useful tools and I wish we could have
a bit, maybe 20 to 30% less of the kind of rac wonder business, which I suspect
is the sales pitch for investors and bears very little relationship to what's
actually like what's actually happening is interesting enough without having to
treat them as the kind of incoming God king when you're putting white genocide
Andy: in.
Helen: them.
Andy: now we come onto the, final section of today's show, which is,
as I I teased at the top of the show that I have crossed the Rubicon.
So many journalists crossed from journalism to lobbying
pr, all these dark arts.
and I think I might have Taking a toe across the
water, does, if not lobbying.
Certainly
campaigning.
Helen: a spokes model for Anusol.
right.
Andy: right.
And if I if you put in the offer code
private eye on the
Anusol
website.
What
happened?
Helen: been doing?
Andy: you will remember, because you tease me about it on a weekly
basis, you two that, a few months ago we talked about, like electric
cars and like charging and how the.
Process is quite complicated and maybe doesn't need to be.
Quite as complicated as it
Helen: is.
What I remember is that you were trying to get essentially the cable point
from your house to the pa to the curb.
Andy: Yes.
Which
Helen: going through the pavement, which then your counselor had a view on and
every man and his dog had a view on.
Andy: on Absolutely.
Adam: was born the Superhero Gully.
Andy: born not
even Gully man.
I'm 37.
Adam: kid.
Andy: so that's, basically it.
And I was in the middle of what turned into I think a 10 month
process of paperwork, which.
Ha, happy to relate.
Turned into an hour and a half process of actually installing this
Helen: thing.
Andy: It was
installed.
I've moved on with my life, I can, we talking about
so we just finished this but the nice thing that's unlocked is
basically I even without a driveway on my home, I can charge up my car
for a Fiverr from nought to full.
Using an like cheap overnight electricity.
It's the, they talk about the last mile problem in lots of business.
This is like a last meter problem.
It's literally that final, tiny bit, so we covered this on
the podcast a few months ago.
At the same time I wrote something about it in the magazine,
which we very childishly called Shy of the Charge Brigade.
and then I got an invitation from a group called EVA England, who represent
specifically drivers of electric cars, to go to Parliament, where they were
having an event for mps to talk to 'em about, how this is going, like how the
transition is going and how it can be.
Improved And their basic contention is there is a lot of attention being
paid to electric car manufacturers.
can we lure a factory here or there?
Can we get a battery factory?
All that stuff.
And there's lots of attention being paid to ChargePoint operators who are
the people who build, at a motorway services, the big banks of really rapid
chargers.
That's a
Helen: row in, the US about whether or not the Biden administration promised
to build all of these charging points.
And actually, how many of them did it actually manage to get
through planning permission at
Andy: the
time.
yeah.
But
no one is
Helen: paying, you're saying no one is taking attention to you, the little
Andy: guy
Adam: go
Helen: guy.
Andy: but the, the actual driver experience is a completely different
thing, and it's all very well, like labor have been mucking around with
the date by which new cars will have to be electric, specifically new cars.
of car purchases are.
Like secondhand, but it's all very well to decree something.
But actually, if you don't make it easy for drivers, you're gonna
have this growing body of people who think, that looks like a pain.
I can't be bothered.
I'm not gonna make the switch.
which will be a really big failure of policy for the government.
So the event was Like gathering a few electric drivers
together just to talk to mps.
but the thing is, you don't get A huge captive audience.
They don't actually let you go into the chamber.
Just nip in after pm Qs and say,
hi,
everybody.
Quick point.
You have to get them to come to you.
Helen: you're the honey trap.
Andy: I was the honey.
what you have to do is you have to hold a thing called a drop-in event.
you have to be hosted in parliament by an mp, so you have to get one MP who
actually cares about this thing at all.
they will then book you a room.
You go to the room and you have invited MPS along.
The MP for this one was a guy called Perran Moon, who's,
caught down in Cornwall.
crazy
the mps hopefully come to you because you've sent out an invitation, you've
notified them, blah, blah, blah.
It's gone on the mailing list.
Like these drop-in events are happening today.
So the event after us was something about rugby,
Helen: MPS
live in this sort of perpetual, fresh as fair
Andy: people, yeah, gonna say
this
all the best
using
Adam: the
best biscuits on the best stools, isn't it?
And
Andy: it's a bit of the procedure that I really hadn't known
anything about, like I've never.
I'd never seen one of these things happening before, obviously,
'cause they're not televised.
It's much more one-to-one briefing
Helen: They're not televised.
I know.
God knows.
Why not, aren't you?
Andy: I, did have
Helen: visions
of,
Andy: I imagine that this will be on this, the six o'clock news, maybe the
10,
Helen: How lovely though.
Andy: So did
you you
Helen: to do your sales spiel about like how important it's that
you get across the gully problem.
'cause that's putting people off.
Andy: Yeah.
And they were keen to say to EV England were keen to say, look, this is not a, you
don't have to pitch the solution, right?
You don't
need to say, and this is why this amendment should be
added to the planning bill.
But the, basically it's the idea is you are telling MPS what your experience
has been and fortunately I was able
to say, here's my experience.
It was a bit of a nightmare.
I, imagine it could be made simpler in lots of ways.
Helen: and you didn't get any money, I
presume.
Andy: money, I presume.
no.
Goodness.
No.
Helen: Right.
Yeah.
Andy: I actually
Helen: ethical conflict, but you were just there as a citizen to
offer your experience,
Andy: not only did I not get paid for it, I came back from a holiday I was
on
for one
day.
Adam: Oh,
Helen: your family put up with a
Andy: so yeah, it was fascinating, but it was a weird.
insight into how yeah, mps are getting their information because obviously
you are briefing people one-on-one and bigger organizations will have the
ear of ministers and things like that.
Smaller organizations don't of course, 'cause there's such limited
time to, to talk to ministers.
Helen: Think that's stuff that people don't see in Parliament, APGs or another.
a good example of this, which is the all party
parliamentary groups and there are on all kinds of stuff.
Now, some of them we've written about in the magazine.
Because they receive funding from, lobbyists who are, keen to push their
own product or whatever it might be.
Andy: Yeah.
generally,
Helen: there are all kinds of associations for mps to get up to
speed on weird little niche matters.
Andy: that's a hugely important thing, the briefing element of it.
'cause you need in, if you're passing a law, you need to Know what the
effects are gonna be on the ground.
And
Helen: yeah, there
are
people
Andy: who can brief you quite well,
know,
Helen: one of the complaints about the way that the assisted dying bill has
been, has gone through is that people haven't had enough time to really get the
briefings that they feel they needed to make the decisions they were gonna make.
Andy: Yeah.
And,
then people
Helen: essentially buying policy off the shelf.
is another accusation you get in those situations too.
Andy: Yeah.
And so the, and the aim of this, if you view it as a, of lobbying exercise, which
it is, is it campaigning, is it lobbying?
the aim of it is to get, the planning bill, which is currently going
through amended and it's such, sort of boring unsexy stuff, It really is.
It's very detailed niche, but the effect is potentially quite big, which is that.
You need an amendment, which will make it easier to get one of these things in just
so you can get across that last meter.
And the government have already announced if you're one of the big
ChargePoint operators, building the street furniture and all of this stuff,
they've simplified that procedure.
And this, I cannot believe this, they're changing it from being
a license to being a permit.
And that doesn't, I
know,
and
that is huge, right?
They hold
Helen: it the Hunter Murray clause.
Andy: don't.
I'll be carried shoulder high from the chamber.
Yeah.
But no.
A license to a permit.
It sounds mad, doesn't it?
And yet that is a massive time saver for them.
'cause they don't have to go through all this bureaucracy to install their stuff.
So one of the aims is like, to make charging easier, you, put that cross
pavement channel into the permit box rather than the current license box.
And these are the small things on which I think big policy matters will live or die.
Helen: did you have any conversations with any mps that made you think you are
great or conversely, you're an idiot?
Andy: Everyone I spoke to was
quite engaged.
I suppose the only people who go along to this.
yeah.
And, actually some mps could, so I invited my local MP who couldn't come, but sent
along a representative from, his office.
You probably get people who exactly as you say, self-select for,
uh,
Helen: your MP box across his office.
It's
Andrew Hunter Murray talking about send 11 letter about gullies.
Andy: yeah.
We'll have to send someone along.
yeah, But no, it was fascinating.
and recommended,
Helen: that's not nice to have a bit of functional government in this podcast.
Not something that comes along very
Andy: often just about.
I think the amendment won't happen in the Commons, but it
may happen in the House of Lords.
So that's, and the Lords is where legislation actually gets changed,
which is a whole other kettle of fish.
'cause you have a lot more subject specific experts in the Lords rather
than, I mean in the comments, you just have to vote with your party
normally, otherwise you are rebelling.
So I
Helen: they'll make you a Lord.
Think about it, Lord Hunter Murray of
Adam: Gulley, Lord.
how would that,
is
that better than the Gly
Helen: point?
Andy: it's not impossible.
I'll get
Helen: a crossbencher,
Andy: some kind of gong for this, but that's not for me to say.
It's not for me to say.
Adam: Gully.
Helen: that's
Andy: thanks for taking it seriously,
guys.
Helen: I
was absolutely fine until you got to the bit where you
said I cut short off family holiday.
That was when
Adam: I
Helen: Nope, he's in the grip of a madness.
Andy: he's gone.
he's
fully gone.
Yeah.
I think the, funny thing was the people I spoke to.
I was trying to be positive about it and say, look, the thing you can do is
unlock a five pound chart for millions of people who otherwise won't get it.
I think probably a more effective way is to say.
Your constituents will really be furious and pissed off if you've
decreed this thing and you've made it hard for them to get, or you
have to pay loads for your charge.
I, suspect that mps react quite well to, irritated constituents
rather than optimistic ones.
Helen: Oh, but also, what were you saying?
It was cost,
it would cost to charge your car if
you couldn't use your curbside one, if you had to use a commercial
one.
Andy: it, it, varies so much.
That's the weird
Helen: thing.
Yeah, but what's The upper end
Andy: the upper end
is I dunno, 30 or 40
Helen: quid,
right?
So if you say to your constituents, you can buy an electric car and instead
of charging it for 40 quid, you'll be able to charge it for a fiver.
If I pass
this
Andy: right,
Helen: when everyone worries about the cost of fuel and the government won't
put, put up fuel duty now for over a decade because of
worries about that.
Andy: Yeah.
I feel like attempting offer.
But look, I'm just Andrew Hunter Gully,
can
in
the
spirit
just
Adam: suggest a practical solution for all of those people who say
they can't park outside their
Andy: house
Adam: all ran yours.
Andy: Absolutely.
I will have my tabard on and I
will be manning the gully with great cheer.
Yeah.
That's it for this episode of page 94.
What have we covered?
Who owns new scientist?
We've covered
white genocide
and pavement
charging.
Adam: gullies.
Andy: It's, it is tragic 'cause there'll be literally dozens of
podcasts out this week that do the same three subjects and, what can you do?
With
Adam: something more private Irish?
Andy: if you'd like something even more private, Irish, why not buy the magazine
which has all this and more, so much more.
It's available in Shops on Newstands and it's also available@privatehyeni.co.uk
where you can get your subscription.
That's it from this episode.
thank you very much to you for listening.
And do Matt Hill of rethink audio as always for producing.
We'll be back in two weeks with another one.
Bye for now.