The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- The A.I. Warnings Hit Washington

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Artificial Intelligence was on the minds of Washington legislators yesterday and the discussion was not only important it was for the most part non-partisan.  Some important points are being made and... one wonders whether Ottawa will soon do the same. It was more than two months ago on this program that Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner rang the bell on the issue and could more be around the corner?  Bruce Anderson is back with his thoughts on this and more.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is Wednesday, and that clearly means smoke, mirrors, and the truth. And that means Bruce Anderson is back. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario today. And look who's back. Yes, he is. And he's gone full Scotland on us. Bruce Anderson, he's been off for the last week. But look at the guy.
Starting point is 00:00:36 Just look at him if you're watching us on our YouTube channel. He's got the full Scotland outfit and he's looking very comfortable. You know, I know that you wanted me to dress like this and I'm comfortable up doing it because when I dress like this, I hit a brilliant six iron. Into the breeze, nice high draw. All the things that I can't do when I dress like I do back in Canada. So maybe that's the thing you need to try when you come over here next. You look like one of those guys in those old videos,
Starting point is 00:01:06 the classic old fantastic videos of men golfing in Scotland because that's how they dress. Now, like usually they wear a tie as well in those old videos. That's true. Maybe next week. Pardon me? Maybe next week. I me? Maybe next week. I'll put on a little tie for you.
Starting point is 00:01:27 Yeah. Now, did you actually, like, I know you golf in the hat because I've seen you do that. But were you wearing the vest, too, and that six iron? Yeah, I have. When you chunked that six iron into the air? Excuse me, when you lofted that six iron into the air? Clip it nice, hit the high draw into the breeze. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:01:46 No, when I, yeah, I do sometimes. That's good. Yeah. I'll send you video. Yeah, I'd like to see that. Okay, let's, you know, we could obviously talk about this for the whole show, but we should probably move on and talk to things that other people might be interested in. Right.
Starting point is 00:02:06 There were hearings in Washington yesterday. I know you've briefed yourself on them. The hearings yesterday on artificial intelligence. Now, we have mentioned a number of times in this podcast, I think you were the first to bring it up months ago as a looming issue. And then Michelle Rempel-Garner was with us for a full show a couple of months ago, and her own feeling was she's not against AI, but she says, you know, pause. Time to slow down.
Starting point is 00:02:37 We've got to understand the impact this is going to have. And yesterday that seemed to be very much the feeling inside the washington bubble and you know what it wasn't coming just from politicians and legislators it was coming from some of the ai people themselves some of the top ai people in the u.s and in fact in the world, they weren't necessarily talking about a pause, but they were talking about, Hey, this stuff could use poor, poorly, or in the wrong fashion can be devastatingly bad. Um, I think one of them said, you know, remember when Photoshop first came out years ago, 10, 15 years ago, um, there was a lot of concern about what Photoshop could do to photos.
Starting point is 00:03:30 He said, this is, AI is like Photoshop on steroids. This is, we're going down a path here that if we're not careful, can really create problems. And one of the legislators, Senator Blumenthal, you know, played a tape, and it sounded like him talking about AI. It wasn't him. It was a fake voice created by AI with a fake script created by AI. And he was using the point to say, like, this is all very interesting right now,
Starting point is 00:04:01 but can imagine this in an election campaign and what you could do to your opponent. Anyway, I'm just wondering, like I found this all fascinating yesterday and reading about it again this morning. What's your feeling here? I know you were concerned months ago that we were heading in this direction. So here we are. Yeah, look, I'm really glad that politicians in Washington are taking it seriously, and I'm really glad that they're doing so in a bipartisan fashion. Other than climate change, I can't imagine a more consequential set of policy choices that countries will make in the next 50 years. I think the importance of the disruption that AI will cause is really, really sweeping. And I've read something that says it will be a million times more powerful than it is today in 10 years from now. And one can only kind of imagine
Starting point is 00:05:00 what that means. It's obviously not all bad, but it's obviously the kind of thing that without some sort of regulatory parameters and guidance from a public policy standpoint could produce some extremely difficult, challenging, and bad outcomes. What I saw in the output of the hearings yesterday was that there seemed to be three questions that were being centered on. And there's an interesting Politico article, which I tweeted today, which summarizes them. The first is, is an agency needed to regulate the way in which AI is used? And in America, usually that kind of question gets a lot of polarization. But interestingly, there were people like Lindsey Graham on the Republican side who
Starting point is 00:05:53 were saying, it's probably a good idea. And even more interesting was the fact that they seem to be saying it would be better if it was an international agency. In other words, that if it didn't only affect the use of AI within the United States, but recognize that there are global enterprises that are going to use AI and that the implications of what they do and how they use it won't be contained by borders. And so an international agency would be a better way to approach the question of regulation if a consensus can be developed. And if it starts in the United States, I do have a feeling that the potential for it to become less problematic politically and more widely accepted as a principle. That's something. Now, of course, who knows what happens if there's a completely different administration after the next election,
Starting point is 00:06:49 and don't get me started on Trump or DeSantis, but as for right now, I liked the conversation yesterday. The second question that was addressed there was, who owns the data that AI trains on? So AI is kind of a machine learning based on original content that other people have produced. But all of that content gets blended together to create something new in the course of this technology being applied,
Starting point is 00:07:21 which raises questions about whose original value it was, whether there's appropriate recognition or compensation for that. I don't think the world has really even begun to examine what the implications are if original content that you created could be co-opted that way and used for other purposes without any compensation to you and what that would do to the creative market, as well as the intellectual property market at large. So another really important set of questions that nobody really has a good answer to just yet, I don't think. And then the last question, and you alluded to it in introducing the subject, Peter, is how much will AI influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election? And the argument or the question that's being asked there is the powerful tools that can convince people that somebody said something, which in fact they maybe didn't say.
Starting point is 00:08:23 The potential for that to accelerate and to have an even greater impact is growing by the day, probably. And that is habitually an area where you get into the freedom of speech and let's not have more regulation conversation pretty quickly. On the other hand, weaponized AI to misinform or disinform is a risk that any politician on any part of the spectrum needs to take seriously, or at least I would say the kind of the bigger tent parties. There are probably some fringe players for whom there's no real downside, there's only upside. But that's a reason enough in and of itself, I think, to take it seriously and to figure out how to regulate it. You talked about how AI forms based on content that's kind of all already out there, mixes various content together and produces its own kind of original content, if you will. The problem there is there's all kinds of error potential in that.
Starting point is 00:09:27 And, you know, if you want to understand that, you can sign up to various AI forms, you know, online quite easily. We did that here in our family a little while ago and we punched in my wife's name, Cynthia Dale, who's a fairly well-known television and theatre actress, and just said, tell me about Cynthia Dale. And up immediately within seconds, up pops this 300 or 400 word content piece on Cynthia, and half of it was wrong. They had her in movies she'd never appeared in.
Starting point is 00:10:13 They had her on stage in things she hadn't done. They had some accuracies, but they had a lot of inaccuracies. So, you know, you can see yourself the potential problem just on an error front, but then as you talk about on the election front, the potential of the way it could be used. The other point you make, which was the interesting part of what we saw, at least certainly huge chunks of what we saw yesterday in Washington, was was a nonpartisan event. You had, I mentioned Blumenthal earlier, who's kind of a bit of a lightning rod at times with the Democrats, gets the Republicans really upset,
Starting point is 00:10:54 sitting right beside Senator Hawley. I remember him, he was the guy with his fist in the air supporting the January 6th rioters at the beginning and then running like a scared rabbit through the place uh when it seemed to get out of control um so he's he took a lot of heat from the democrats but yesterday at least in the portions i watched the two of them were sitting side by side nodding at each other's uh comments so there is there is the potential there one of the few times that we've seen it in Washington of late, where there's a nonpartisan approach. And I think that potential exists in Ottawa as well.
Starting point is 00:11:33 I had a lot of nice comments about Michelle Rempel's appearance here on the bridge from other parties who said, yeah, she's right. We've got to talk about this. Do you have a sense that they are talking about it in Ottawa? I think there's thinking going on. I think there's policy work going on. I think there's probably a group of people in government whose job it is to kind of monitor and assess the developments in other countries and to work with different stakeholder groups to try to get a handle on it.
Starting point is 00:12:06 I don't know how far along that process is. To be fair, it isn't really far along anywhere that I can see. The fact that yesterday's hearings in Washington included, you know, a range, I don't know about a whole range of opinion, but the Politico story refers to the fact that IBM's chief privacy and trust officer said existing oversight is enough and more would stifle innovation. And the reference in the piece says that that's a more familiar industry talking point. I don't think a consensus is formed. I do think that it's the politicians who are interested in looking at what policy would be smart here are not necessarily coming at it from either an of we could stifle innovation if we overburdened machine learning and this kind of technology. And so let's not do that. But I think there is some politics likely to be ahead.
Starting point is 00:13:17 In the meantime, I hope that we see continued thoughtful policy development because that's really what we need here. We don't need policy that decides that it wants to put a finger on the ideological side of the spectrum or a political side of the spectrum. But even as I say that, I want to be careful to say that my take on the conversation about whether AI should have a bias is that it should. In other words, that if we allow AI to develop in a way that treats evil and good exactly the same, then we're going to have lots of evil. And we should probably say that that's not a good thing. And so how do we create any kind of a bias against that without creating the kind of political polarization that we see around so many issues?
Starting point is 00:14:15 I think that's the needle hole that the thread has to go through ultimately, but maybe that's a couple of years on. It will be interesting to see how Polyev and the conservatives handle this. I mean, Rempel is kind of out front in her party and what she's suggesting, pause, potential regulation. I mean, Polyev is the no gatekeepers guy, and this seems to be heading towards at least some discussion about some form of gatekeeping, some form of regulation on AI. I'm really glad that Michelle Rample-Garner did that
Starting point is 00:14:54 because I think it is important for conservative voices to weigh in on this and to identify the risks for everybody so that it doesn't become just a question of people on the progressive side of the spectrum doing that and and it may well be that pierre poliev is uh he's an intelligent person he could probably well imagine what ai could do to demonize and undermine his political persona uh if was no regulation of it. So I don't know that it's as easy for him to identify this as a gatekeeper issue. I could be wrong. He could decide the simplest way to handle this is just to say it's part of an agenda of people who don't,
Starting point is 00:15:40 who want to control content. On the other hand, there are some days now where he is definitely, I think, making more of an effort to sound like he wouldn't flip the table over on all of the big policy issues of the day, that there are some areas where he believes that there does need to be a role for government and a more thoughtful one. Now, even as I uttered that sentence, I can feel the Twitter heat coming back at me as soon as this goes to air. So let's not get carried away there, Bruce. But, you know, I mean, let's face it, Bruce. You love the Twitter heat.
Starting point is 00:16:18 I mean, when it comes right down to it, you kind of like the Twitter heat. No, I don't. You like the attention. No. I just worry that as bad as Twitter can be, AI could be a million times worse in two years. So we need to be careful about that. Yeah, I don't think it'll take two years.
Starting point is 00:16:40 Nothing takes two years anymore. Two years from now, we'll be living in a totally different world. We can't even imagine what kind of technology will exist then because things are happening so rapidly. Two years is the new 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.
Starting point is 00:16:56 I don't know, like two years from now, AI could be that thing of the past that we talked about, you know? Anyway, we're going to take a quick break. I want to come back. This is not really related, but it's sort of related. It's some new research that came out of the Pew Research Center
Starting point is 00:17:16 in the last couple of days, which is quite interesting about the way different countries in the world are either sticking to or changing their traditions. How willing are they to embrace change? It's an interesting discussion, especially now when so many things are happening and so much change is in the air on a number of different fronts. So we'll talk about that when we come back.
Starting point is 00:17:56 And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Bruce is in Scotland today. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or, because it's Wednesday, like Friday, we're available on our YouTube channel. So, happy to have you join us on whatever platform you choose. Okay, the Pew Research Center has a pretty good name, has an excellent name, really, from researchers and journalistic organizations around the world. Pew does a lot of research
Starting point is 00:18:36 into various issues that confront us as we move forward in the 21st century. It looks a lot at journalism quite often and has some interesting findings on that front. But they've just come out of a survey and some research in terms of how countries are adapting to change, who's willing to embrace it, who's willing or not willing to embrace it. So the numbers are interesting. So let me go to the numbers guy first of all, and Bruce,
Starting point is 00:19:13 and get your thoughts on what we're discovering here and where we fit into the picture in terms of Canada. Right. There are two really interesting things in this study, and I agree with you completely that anybody that likes to consume, you know, reliable public opinion data, you'll not find a better resource than the Pew Research Center. What they did is they looked across, I think it was 17 different countries, including Canada, United States, the UK, and many others. And they asked a basic question, which is, do you think that your
Starting point is 00:19:45 country will be better off in the future if it embraces and is open to change, or if it sticks to the traditions and way of life that have existed for some time? Now, in Canada and in the United States, the numbers are relatively simple on a top line basis. About two thirds say we'll be better off as a country if we're open to change rather than stick to tradition. And that is traditionally kind of the split between progressive, more progressive thinking, more conservative minded voters in the Canadian marketplace. So it does tell us that part of the reason why we see some friction around a variety of issues, especially those that kind of fall into the diversity, inclusion, and maybe to some degree the climate
Starting point is 00:20:33 change and what do we do about it issues, is that there is a natural tension that exists within our society where more people say change is good for us than say change is bad for us. But there is still a pretty sizable portion of people in Canada, about a third, who say we're better off not changing. Now, the second thing that this survey reveals is that how much that answer to that question of is change good for us or bad for us, depends on whether somebody is on the right side of the spectrum, self-defined, or the left side of the spectrum. And in the analysis, the chart, the one chart that I tweeted out yesterday, shows that the difference between people on the left in the U.S. and people on the right in the U.S. is massive. It's by far the biggest degree of polarization that we see anywhere on
Starting point is 00:21:27 the list of all the countries that are included in it. Our gap, for example, in Canada is 52% of those on the right say change is good for us. 82% of those on the left say change is good for us. That's a pretty wide gap. That's 30 points. And that's telling us why when we have these culture war questions um you know left versus right is a really important dividing line but the reason is that some people want more change i think it's good for us and some people don't like how much change is happening in the united states so our gap is 30 points. In the United States, the gap is 63 points. Only 28% of those on the right in the United States say change is good for their country. 91% of those on the left in the U.S. say change is good for their country. That is a giant fault line that is a grand canyon sized divide in opinion and it explains a lot i think of
Starting point is 00:22:29 what underlies the mega phenomena and the reaction uh by many people to it uh and the degree of polarization that america finds itself in now there's a there's so many different ways to you know you can get carried away with data and i'm sure at times you find yourself getting carried away because you see so many different surveys and research on various topics but you know i love looking at a chart like this and looking at the individual countries as you said whether or there are 17 or 20 countries in this list. But it's interesting when you separate them. The countries that seem to be most open to change are countries in the Far East. You know, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Japan.
Starting point is 00:23:22 They kind of had the list of those that are most open to change versus the more traditional way we look at the world, which is sort of North America and Europe, who are all still open to change, but nowhere near the extent to which I should say some countries aren't open to change, but nowhere near the extent to which, I should say some countries aren't open to change. Greece is at the bottom of the list. Greece is at the bottom of the list, yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:55 There could be a lot of reasons for that. Some cultural, some generational divides, some will have a different definition in mind of what change means. And so I think that this research kind of hints at, you know, a really important part of the story, but only part of the story. And so for me, I do tend to look more at this left-right dichotomy and say, if most of the stories that are telling us about friction in politics around the world, domestic politics around the world, are stories about increasing rights for some people and other people feeling that the rights are relatively less than they used to be, which is certainly something that we see happening in Canada. As we talked about before, there are a surprising number of people who feel as though other people maybe shouldn't have equal rights to theirs. That is a transformation that is happening with some velocity and definitely with some political consequences, which are the kinds of things that are revealed in this chart
Starting point is 00:25:06 that you and I have been talking about and the data set. Okay, I want to move to another question that's sort of deep in your knowledge compartment, and that is polls in general, research in general. I mentioned this yesterday on the podcast. It's an Alberta election situation, the election in Alberta coming up in a couple of weeks now. But there were two polls within a period of a couple of days,
Starting point is 00:25:35 both by reputable, well-known, well-respected polling operations. One is your old company at Abacus, and the other is the Janet Brown polling operation out of Calgary. And as I said, both are, you know, are well-respected. Yeah. But within a couple of days, they came out not with just different results, but dramatically different results. You know, Abacus having the NDP ahead by a significant margin,
Starting point is 00:26:08 and he was, I don't have it in front of me, but I think it was like seven or eight points. And then Janet Brown's operation coming out within days with the opposite of that, even a wider lead for the progressive conservatives, Daniel Smith's party, over the NDP. And so what I said yesterday was I couldn't remember a time at which two major polling companies came out within, you know, literally moments of each other with dramatically different results
Starting point is 00:26:38 and led me to the conclusion that, you know, one of them has to be wrong. They can't both be right when they're that different. How do you look at that situation? Yeah, yeah, it does happen sometimes. The reason, you know, people say the margin of error is X 19 times out of 20 is that there is that theoretical one time out of 20, although nobody really wants to kind of think about it exactly that way. And you're right.
Starting point is 00:27:11 They can't both be right. And when this happens, it's a nightmare for the pollsters because, you know, when you do a survey, you trust your methodology and far, far far far more times than not what it delivers is accurate information but there will be times that you'll see anomalous data and you know whenever in the 40 years or so that i've been in the business and there's a you know you get an anomalous set of data. Everybody goes, that's the end of it. Polling should go away and hide forever, bury itself, bury its head in shame and never inject itself into our conversation again. And I understand that.
Starting point is 00:27:56 But that's not likely to happen. And it probably shouldn't happen. It's just information, right? And some massive quantity, the overwhelming majority of it is pretty accurate and useful information, but every once in a while, something's wrong. So to your point about, well, what's the more accurate interpretation? If you have two poles and they're quite different and you come to the conclusion that they're at the same point in time measuring the same thing, which one is wrong?
Starting point is 00:28:26 The only rule of thumb that I've ever found useful is to try to convince myself, what's my argument for believing data set A, and what's my argument for believing data set B? And so in the case of the Alberta election, I'm looking at it and saying, and you're right, Janet Brown and David Coletto, both, you know, among the most reputable pollsters in the country with a good track record of accuracy. So there's nothing there to look at in terms of the reliability and the trust that we can place in those two pollsters. So when I try to convince myself that Danielle Smith is winning this election, it's a short conversation with myself.
Starting point is 00:29:11 I don't have an awful lot of things. If I try to kind of enumerate the things on the fingers of one hand, I only get about halfway through the hand. I just don't have that much to work with in trying to craft an argument that Danielle Smith has been winning this election campaign. If I try to do the opposite, it's kind of easy to see some reasons why the NDP might be doing better. That Danielle Smith has had a pretty rocky campaign. There are more questions being raised, even among
Starting point is 00:29:46 conservatives, about her leadership. And that's not really happening with Rachel Notley. There does seem to be a sense that there's an unpredictability to the UCP under Danielle Smith. And that's the kind of thing that I think is making people feel like, you know, maybe they made the wrong leadership choice, but let's just go ahead and elect them, even if we think that's the case. It's not a very strong argument, but it is one that you hear. And the last thing I would say is that I do follow the Alberta media about this, the Braids and others who write about Alberta politics and have done so for a long time. And I don't see a narrative developing in their work that says the UCP has put a great platform in front of people, is campaigning well. It is more apparent to me that they're kind of leaning
Starting point is 00:30:41 in on the Daniel Smith's campaign is not everything that the UCP might have hoped that it would be. So I don't want to overemphasize that because I really do believe that the right thing to do is to stress test both arguments and see where you come out. But where I come from in terms of what I've been consuming about this, I'd be a little bit more likely to believe the, uh, the abacus numbers here. Um, but you know, the last point is you always got to wait for the next data set because when you have two conflicting data points like this, the third is, is kind of a tiebreaker in terms of which is the more likely to be accurate result.
Starting point is 00:31:26 Well, if there's one thing you can be sure with a couple of weeks left in the campaign, there are going to be more data sets coming out. So we can see that. It's just an interesting moment in time. Council also published a poll, I think, yesterday, which was a little bit more in line with the Abacus results. So that's another factor for people to take into account. And I'm not cheerleading the Abacus results. So that's another factor for people to take into account. And I'm not cheerleading for Abacus here, although I love
Starting point is 00:31:49 David and the company and enjoy a continued association with it. I have nothing bad to say about Janet and her work. But I do think that when you sort of stack up the pieces of data that sort of argue that the NDP is ahead, right now there seems to be a little bit more of that evidence for me. Well, the one thing they agree on is that the fight is Calgary. It's all about Calgary and the way things will play out there. Let me ask you one more thing about those two polls. It's not really just about them.
Starting point is 00:32:22 It's about polling two polls. It's not really just about them. It's about polling in general. There are public opinion polls in the sense that they are for the public. They could be for a newspaper or for a university or what have you, and they're published that way. Then there are polls that are done for private clients, and you often don't know who that client is, but then they somehow leak out either the client leaks it or the pollster leaks it or somebody in between who is aware the numbers leaks it um should we look at either of those two differently or should we look at the two
Starting point is 00:33:02 sets of numbers differently if it was done with the intention of being made public or with the intention of being held privately by the client who paid for the data? Well, I think it's always a good idea to be alert to the potential for those kinds of conflicts to happen. But that having been said, in a situation where you've got experienced, savvy pollsters putting election horse race data into the public marketplace, it would be very unusual for those kinds of companies or practitioners to put at risk their reputation in order to serve some other agenda. Um, if, if, if somebody leaked an Acme poll, uh, tomorrow
Starting point is 00:33:55 that said, um, you know, that Rachel Notley's popularity had dropped by 20 points and nobody had ever heard of ACME. And you didn't know who paid for the poll. I would definitely agree with the hypothesis that that should be treated with a little bit more hesitancy, maybe a lot more. Maybe I'm understating. But in a situation like this, it would seem to me quite unlikely that that kind of thing would be a consideration but it's definitely everybody should look at polls as information and they should evaluate the information these days on the basis of a variety of factors not just the fact that the number was published
Starting point is 00:34:42 but who did the work maybe who paid did the work, maybe who paid for the work, what about the question design, are there any other variables that we should look at, but I don't think that that's likely to be a problem in this particular case, but I think it's a question always that people should ask. Okay, here's your last question for this week. You've been over there in the UK for a couple of weeks. You follow closely, because it's your business to follow closely, the situation in Canada. But you can't help from being there, also watching and being, you know, interested in what's happening in whether it's Scotland or England or Wales or Ireland or in Western Europe. Are you learning any new lessons about modern day politics from watching how others are engaging in the process on that side of the Atlantic?
Starting point is 00:35:52 Are you seeing anything new that either can apply here or could apply here? That's a great question. I think that I am struck by the fact that the conservatives nationally in the UK are, you know, really underwater in the polls, right? They're way, way, way behind Labour. They've been in power for a good length of time. They've gone through a few different leaders. Got a new one now. Those are, in Rishi Sunak, those are often conditions that lead to a staleness in the way in which a government kind of explains itself or campaigns or communicates. And I've been a little bit struck by how the, under SUNAC, this government is able to get a message out that says, here's what we're going to do to fix the NHS waiting lists.
Starting point is 00:36:52 Here's what we're going to do to fix some other bottleneck or public service problem that you're seeing. And in that sense, I don't feel like it's necessarily the most inventive thing I've ever seen, but it's the hardest thing for a long-serving incumbent government to do, which is to kind of craft that sense that we're going to improve upon our own record, and we're not going to spend our time talking about how good our record is, but how much emphasis we're putting on a new solution to change an existing, a current problem. I think it's a great lesson for incumbent governments everywhere, including in Canada's. And so I have been noticing that.
Starting point is 00:37:33 I don't know whether it will work. There could be such a degree of fatigue and mistrust for the UK Tories that it won't. But I see what they're trying, and I think that it's probably the right thing for them to try. The other thing, I guess, is it's really hard to tell right now, and maybe we can talk about it again in another week or so, but there does seem to be a different feeling around the Russia-Ukraine war. A more sense that maybe Russia is kind of coming to a place where it needs to either push
Starting point is 00:38:07 hard to win or it's going to lose. And I say that in part because I think the countries that are allied in support of Ukraine are starting to push more chips into the table. And you probably discussed this with Brian Stewart earlier this week or yesterday even. But I am seeing, you know, plenty of evidence that this is, you know, even if in the U.S. it's becoming a little bit more of a, you know, Democrats versus Republicans and the Republicans are saying, why should we even bother with this? I think in Europe, it's definitely kind of feeling like it's going in the other direction where France and the UK and others are saying it's time for us to step up and add more ordinance and training and support for Ukraine to put a big push on. And there is some evidence to me anyway that there's some fissures within the Russian side of things. Again, I'm probably traveling a road that you and Brian went down much better.
Starting point is 00:39:08 You are a bit, but it's good to hear it from that perspective, from witnessing it from there. But you are in sync with what Brian was saying just yesterday. And there is a sense, you know, I mean, Zelensky was just there in the UK right with sunak and and it was exactly that they were put england was pushing britain was pushing more into the center of the table in terms of uh support for ukraine and arms for ukraine but so was france and germany um and that can make a difference there is a sense i, somehow that we're reaching a point here
Starting point is 00:39:46 where something is likely to happen over the next weeks or months in terms of bringing this to some form of conclusion, if only temporary. But, you know, we'll see. We've been surprised on this story ever since it started almost a year and a half ago now. We'll see what happens. But those are interesting observations. So let me leave you with this then.
Starting point is 00:40:12 In your rush to go full Scotland, have you got the kilt on order or what? Look, I'm lucky at this point to be able to get away with wearing a beard it's coming under some pressure we're gonna see how long it lasts I don't think I want to push my locks any more than that for the time being oh you have a beard or are you just starting or what's the idea I've got hair up here too Alright my friend Good to talk to you And you'll be back on Friday With Chantel for Good Talk
Starting point is 00:40:51 That's Bruce Anderson Talking to us from the UK Talking to us from beautiful Scotland That's it for this day And for this week For Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth Tomorrow it's your turn And the Random Ranter.
Starting point is 00:41:05 Friday, Good Talk with Chantel and Bruce. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.

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