The Rest Is Politics - 558. The 'Cockroach' Uprising and Should We Stop Data Centres?

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Is Modi's power finally cracking as the Cockroach Janta Party's mass protests force a minister to resign for the first time in over a decade? Does the new US-Saudi uranium deal risk triggering a fresh wave of nuclear proliferation across the Middle East and beyond? If AI data centres are the foundation of future defence and security, can Britain build them without wrecking its water supplies and climate targets? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland, by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Adam Thornton, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, finally in trouble? In India, for the first time in 12 years, street protests have forced the resignation of a government minister. Look, there's been plenty of unrest before. There's been farmers' protests. There's been demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, conflict in Manipur, enormous mobilizations. But the minister always stayed in post. And Narendra Modi's message was, this doesn't work, don't try it. And now it's changed.

I think three things made this week completely different for Narendra Modi. First, a trigger factor that really enraged. These were protests that came out of leaks on examination results forcing more than 2 million people to reset their pre-medical exams and leading to suicide. Second, the protesters won the battle for social media, particularly on Instagram. Millions of people watching phone footage of police beating protesters,

witty memes, clever jokes propelling the movement. And third, the name. The Chief Justice compared unemployed graduates to cockroaches. And a 30-year-old Dalit man replied, What if all the cockroaches came together? And they did. For a decade, the Indian government has cast its critics as liberals, soft-on-Pakistan, different ordinary people.

This time, it didn't work. So, is this the first crack in Modi's power? Or is it just a pressure valve? This episode is powered by fuse energy. Now, changing your energy supplier should be fairly straightforward, yet many of us still put it off, even when we might be paying more than we need to. It becomes one of those jobs we know we should do, but never quite get around to. Switching energy suppliers always manage to somehow get pushed the bottom of the to-do list. And it's probably because we think the process is going to be really, really complicated.

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Explore OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Welcome to the rest of the question time with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So Rory, India, massive, massive news. Ishan and Tashi have written, Hi, Alastron Rory. Why is political accountability still so out of reach in India? What do you make of the Cockroach Janta Party?

And is there any reason to think it will be more effective than recent movements? Or does real change now require mass uprisings, like those in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Indonesia? Well, I think the first thing to say is that this was very, very, very important. very startling and different and actually took a lot of people in India by surprise. So the sort of demonstrations that a lot of people had focused on in the past were the demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act. This was the moment where Narendra Modi basically made it easy for people to get citizenship who were not Muslims. And there were large demonstrations, which was quite kind of left progressive civil society demonstrations against what they saw as

a real example of authoritarian populist, anti-Muslim prejudice coming out of this Hindu nationalist party. But those protests were very rapidly characterized by the government as being sort of left-leaning, elitist. They would say, and there's this whole troll army, which we've talked about, where Modi supporters would say, these people are, you know, Soros-funded. they're, if you look at the Twitter, these are maybe references that people don't get so much, they don't know Delhi, but they're people who go to Khan Market, which is the old city to eat Muslim food, they eat biryani across the border in Pakistan. And they were very quite high-minded those protests.

So if you watch them, they would be quoting a poetry from Fais al-Afmad Fais, who is the great Urdu poet. and they would quote these rather kind of grand Urdu poems as part of their demonstrations. And there was a lot of talk about Azadiy or freedom, freedom from capitalism, freedom from patriarchy. Now, this time, it's become completely different because this is much more socially diverse. So in the Parliament Square demonstrations, in Janta Manta, which is where a lot of these demonstrations to take place for the first time. Yes, you've got the students, but they're not doing these kind of high-minded Urdu chants. They're much funnier, very, very rude social media stuff, people holding up placards, saying

things like, my tampon is more leakproofs than the Ministry of Education, right, this kind of stuff. And then you've got real kind of working class people out there, taking on the police at half-past two in the morning, who are not frightened by the surveillance state. There's been a loss of Modi putting in cameras and people wired their digitalized. ID cards being stripped. But there are some real people, the poorest sectors of Delhi society out there saying, this is the police that demolished my home. I don't care a damn about surveillance. Hit me with people filming it. Anyway, over to you. I mean, it is a big, big moment. This. Modi, a couple of things about Modi, he does not like backing down on anything. He does not like

anyone else dictating his terms, whether that's domestically or internationally. And here's a case where I'm afraid that has happened. And it's happened in part, as you say, because of the sheer numbers and the consistency. I think it's also, we've had lots of our listeners and viewers sending us videos of the sort of violence of the police against, I watch one,

whereas a guy literally just lying on the floor kind of just trying to protect himself and these guys are going to, you know, whipping him and what have you. So that was kind of doing the rounds. And also the minister himself, he's had a few controversies before, Darmendra Pradan,

and he dismissed the protesters as B-Team terrorists. Modi was, as you say, projecting them as, you know, disloyal, unpatriarch. sort of, et cetera. We should probably get this guy, Dipke, Mr. Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party. If you're listening, Mr. Dipke, we'd love to have you on the rest of his policies, because he was somebody who saw what was happening, and I think it was living in the United States, and he thought, I've got to do something. He went back and he just started this Cockroach Janta party, and people will know Modi's party is called the BJP, so this is now the CJP, very deliberate,

And there's a really big, bigger, serious point, even more serious point to this. Demography has been the big card that India thought it had to play against China. They always talk about that we've got a democratic dividend. Now, Rory, what do you think the, here's a question for you. This is a bit harsh because I didn't say I was going to do this. I just looked it up when you were off getting a cup of tea. What do you think the median age is in the UK? So that's the age at which there are just as many people under this age as over this age.

It's right in the middle. I would guess a bit younger than me. Let's say 47. Okay. It's just under, just over 40. Okay. What is it in China? Just over 40.

What is it in the United States? Just under 40. What is it in India? The median age in India is 29. Okay. Here's the question for you. What's the median age in Nigeria? Oh, I'm going.

going, you've got, what's your thing in 20 by 2030? 10. I'm going 27. 16. That's amazing. It means every time you have an election, almost everybody voting has had nothing to do with politics before they vote. It's extraordinary.

Wow. That is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Well, the thing is, so what it means, even more so in Nigeria. So in India, what it means is that an overwhelming majority, of the population is between the ages of working age, okay? And yet most of them, the younger ones are not finally working. There's medical students' exam.

So what's happened is that there was a leak of, and essentially what people seemed to be saying is that if you were rich enough to buy the medical paper, the exam papers before, you could get your hands on them. So corruption in the system. 2.2 million students sat the medical school exam, and they were competing for 140,000 places. So you go through that process, quite expensive for a lot of them.

You sit the exams, then they get cancelled. And also completely miserable preparation, I think the cramming and the pressure that you're under from society, parents and from yourself. And the number of hours you're putting in over years to just get there. And so then the government announces, there's been a leak of this, all this, so you're all going to have to take them all again. And of course, then they have to make different exams, so it's not just the rerun. 21 people kill themselves. And that is, I think, a lot of the thing that has fuel this. But let me just give you another stat. This is sort of mind-blowing stuff. 40% of graduates, graduates, up to the age of 25, are unemployed. 10 million people applied for 35,000 new jobs in the railways. 10 million.

So you're talking about young people who are thinking, there's Modi, there's the guy who said, He was going to make India great. He was going to, you know, we will. And he always says as part of his sort of great India strategy is it's because we've got this demographic dividend. We've got so many young people. And the fact that they've turned in this way is big sign. Maybe you've put your finger out.

We keep saying we're going to do more on demography. But you're completely right that if you put the clock back a few years, the basic stories, you're better off being a younger country. So the Chinese population is going to shrink by hundreds of millions. And generally, as you get older, and this is the problem we've got in Britain, you get less innovative, people take less risk, more and more people are obviously taking from the state. But in a world where technology is changing very fast, and when AI is coming in, robotics is coming in, there is a question about the traditional employment path for young people, particularly

in poorer countries. So, you know, in Nigeria, for example, people thought that the route to middle income status was software engineering, coding, call centers, which are the first things which AI's hit. And China's got this very interesting problem, which people don't talk about enough, which is they've got a serious youth unemployment problem. A lot of people living at home, they're not even counting youth unemployment properly. So on the one hand, we're hearing that the problem that China faces is demographic, which is they don't have enough young people. But on the other hand, as you point out, those young people don't have jobs. So there's something wrong with this story. Yeah.

I think, look, he's been in power for 12 years. He's been in power quite a long time. And because his story domestically has just been, you know, he projects a sense of success and Indian power. And, you know, he is an extraordinary political phenomenon. But he's not used to this. I mean, I think he's had a ministerial resignation before because of scandal. but he's never had a ministerial resignation that, as it were, has been forced by political and public pressure.

I think he's in real trouble. I think he's in real trouble. I think this might be the beginnings of a sort of Bangladesh-style moment. I mean, remember, Sheikh Hasina looked pretty and vulnerable and then was toppled. Do we think, but we don't, we don't, do we think Modi's terribly corrupt in the way that? There's an enormous amount of corruption, and more than that, there are brutal authoritarian tendencies, which are whining, people up because the TV stations are basically controlled by Modi and his cronies. This is similar to the story that we found when we interviewed the president of Serbia. They barely covered these demonstrations. If you watched Maine Indian TV, you wouldn't get any idea of these demonstrations taking place. They removed 9.1 million people from a voter role before they went

into an election, which they just won. Yeah. And West Bengal. And this is a government that has treated its opponents absolutely brutally, but has depended on the idea that if you were a critic of Modi and many, many, you know, imagine if you're a Muslim in India, you are being marginalized, you're really struggling to get jobs, you're really struggling to get into civil service, etc. But you sort of felt he's unstoppable. It's like any of these populists when they're at their peak, Trump, Farage, a moment where people think, what can I do? This guy's so popular. He just wins and and wins. The edge is now coming off very significantly because for the first time his social media campaign isn't working. He's got 110,000 followers on Instagram. But when he tried to post...

110,000? 10,000. I'm sorry. 10 million. I'm sorry. I'm so, so, so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I'm so 10 million. Yeah, you know, he's almost up there with Beyonce. I mean, it's unbelievable, right? It's, it's really unbelievable. But for the first time when he posted, people were really able to, to rip into him and tease him. He talks with these very odd pauses. So you'd have young Indians posting things where they would say a sentence

and then halfway through a sentence go off to make a cup of coffee and then come back three minutes later. Like you do what we're recording the podcast. Exactly, just slightly on the podcast. And a lot of their posters are showing Modi in saris. They're saying things like,

I can't see your democracy because my lashes are too long. Because he's trying to say that they're all funded by foreign governments. They've got big posters saying, nobody funds me, I hate this government for free. And Modi has really thrown off balance by the fact

that a new class has come out, there are new coalitions emerging. No, it's not something that Congress is really able to exploit. I think Congress is looking very, very normally sort of leaden footed. But I do think it's a real trouble for Modi. But it's interesting you talk about the media.

So West Bengal, I was talking to somebody in India, well, actually it doesn't live in India, but is Indian and, you know, former politician. And I was trying to get their take on what was going on. He was quite supportive of Modi and said, yeah, but you know, okay, it's a big problem. But, look, he's just had this amazing win in West Bengal. So he told me about it, and he said, you know, this is a place more than a hundred million. The BJP has never won there. They've never won.

And he's just won. And so I thought, well, that's really interesting. and then I've checked up some of the local, the Indian media. And what you've just said, until yesterday, I didn't know there was this allegation that they'd removed almost 10 million people in the population of 100 billion off the electoral roll. So I'm assuming that's the sort of thing

that maybe will be going down pretty badly with quite a lot of people as well. The other thing that's so interesting about the cockroach rebellion, as it were, India is so big. And you have these, West Bengal is bigger population-wise than any European-com. country.

Okay? It's bigger than Germany. It's bigger than, it's got more people than Germany. And it's one of what? They have 20, 27, 28 states. How many states? They have a lot of states. And this is one of them.

So getting a national, Modi has completely commanded the national space. Right? He's, as you say, leads the news every night. Social media galore. What this, what the cockroach chant party seemed to being able to do is actually to command a national message. I wonder as well what they're going to do, because when the minister resigned, they said, okay, we've achieved our objectives, off we go, that's it for now. But, you know, clearly they can start to become a serious political force. Do they, you know,

field candidates. They're doing this thing a bit like the, a bit like the Greens. And I see Zach Polanski's got himself into a bit of a mess with something about a T-shirt and a tweet. But they don't want to have a leader. The cockroach Janter Party doesn't want to have a leader. So anyway, listen, you're right. It's going to be interesting. But I'm deadly serious. If the CJP want to come on the podcast, we're here for you. And Modi as well.

We've always said we'd love to have Modi on, but I'm not sure you'll come on right now. I wonder whether there isn't also something interesting about how you challenge populism, which might be a lesson that maybe it's there in Hungary and might be a lesson for exporting. One of the things they've done is they've stopped using these very apparently kind of elitist slogans, these kind of orderly poems. and they're actually chanting often the BJP's own chance back at them. So they're chanting, you know, Jaybim or Barat Matakijai, which is praise to Mother India or victory to Mother India,

Vande Mataram, I bow to the mother. These are a very, very evocative Hindu nationalist chants now being chanted back at the BJP who they're opposing. So that then makes it a little bit more difficult, I think, for them to be portrayed as out of time. elitist. And of course, they're also doing things that we don't understand. So when they're running away from the police and being beaten, the little post will say, I'm keeping my Strava streak alive, which is a reference to a kind of running program. Or they're also using subway surfers,

which is a video game, I think, about runners. Somebody, a younger listener can correct me here. So you're being beaten by the police, you're running away, but you're basically playing out some sort of version of Super Mario when you're doing, which was true in Nepal. Remember in Nepal, they were using a lot of memes. So I do think this question of how social media, which is used by the populace to oppress, humor then comes back. You mentioned populism, and we've been talking about the most populist democracy in the world. I think we should give a shout out to our latest episode of Leading, which is the leader of one of the smallest democracies in the world. That's Iceland.

Kristen Froste Dottor. Well, look, we should encourage people to listen. It's an amazing listen, and it's a very, very different scale of government. a very different scale of democracy. Now, I had a question, though, to move us on from somebody called Hardin, and I wonder whether Hardin comes from this place that you're talking about. Or maybe I've mispronounced it. Maybe he's called Hayden. How does the new US-Saudy agreement on domestic uranium enrichment affect regional nuclear stability? And will Iran and the UAE now demand equivalent capabilities to avoid falling behind their neighbours? Well, I find this quite scary

because even though you have Trump and the energy secretary Chris Wright and the Saudis saying this is all just about, you know, civil use of uranium, I think Hayden is on point. What does this do to not just Saudi potential ambitions, but also to the ambitions of those in the region? So it does feel, and this is where... Can I do a quick explainer and then get to the country just so people follow it? So very, very interestingly, Saudi Arabia has been pushing for decades now to build a big nuclear generation facilities. It's a very strange thing in some ways from the outside to be doing because they've got a lot of oil of gas and they've also now got an enormous amount of cheap solar. Fantastic air quality, great sunlight, one of the best places to generate solar energy. So the question is, why do they need these big nuclear facilities, which are actually more expensive

than generating with the gas and the solar that they actually have? Well, the key is the detail in this negotiation where unlike UAE, which has said it will take American technology, but not enrich, the Saudis are rather oddly demanding that they can enrich their own uranium. This again is very strange because you can buy enriched uranium on the international markets from Central Asia and elsewhere, surprisingly cheaply, right? It's not an economic move. Should we get our own? Should we buy our own as trip? We should have our own enriched uranium. So why do the Saudis want to enrich uranium? Well, that connects to a much longer story, going back to the 90s or 80s, in fact, where Saudi seems to be involved in funding part of the Pakistan nuclear program, where Mohammed bin Salman

said openly more than a decade ago that if Iran got nuclear weapons, Saudi was going to have to get nuclear weapons. So it's partly about technology, it's partly about skills, but it's partly about giving you optionality to build a nuclear weapon back over the... No, exactly. Well, you've explained that extremely well, and you've also put your finger on why I find it so worrying, because, you know, it does sort of beg the question, well, why this, why now? I mean, you know, Iran has been something of a threat for some time. the Saudis did sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Trump, and this is, I'm afraid, is what happens.

And I know I've got Trump derangement syndrome, and I know you've got a bit it as well, but it's so hard to take them at face value. So when Trump says that they won't ever use this for, you know, military use and when Chris Wright says that this is an agreement that sort of binds them in on levels that you wouldn't be able to go to. I find it hard to believe them. I find out to take a face value.

And then, of course, the Saudis, you know, they are a hugely powerful player in that region. You've see some of the military involvement that they've had right around the region. And, you know, we've talked often about Yemen and what they do there. Just ask yourself this question. Do you think, deep down, that while there exists a threat of Iran getting a nuclear weapon and while there exists the reality that Israel already has them, that the Saudis wouldn't think, actually particularly with Trump, in charge that maybe they need to get down this track themselves. Absolutely. And I'm afraid nuclear proliferation is going to become much, much more common

because it's also true that China can provide the technology if the US won't. And that wasn't true so much 30, 40 years ago. The Chinese technology is now much better. It's also true that as our famous rules-based international order collapses and the American guarantees collapse, you know, Sweden might talk about getting nuclear weapons. Germany might talk about nuclear weapons there are, the more nuclear weapons there are the more risk we all face. This is something coming in a miniseries. I've just interviewed Carlo Rovelli, in which Carlo Rovelli, this brilliant scientist, who people probably know best for writing about time and gravity, is now ringing the alarm bell on nuclear proliferation and saying, this is probably

the biggest single existential threat facing humanity. And I kept saying to him in this conversation. You kept saying, no, it's not, it's the climate crisis, didn't you? Well, no, I kept saying, I kept saying you're not worried. You sound a bit in 1960s. I mean, this was like everyone's bigging bunkers in their backyard, and we all thought nuclear war was going to end the world. And he said, you're absolutely right. And yet, if you actually look at the indicators and the way the IA measured it, we are at more danger of nuclear war today than we have ever been in history. And we're likely to be at more risk of nuclear war in four or five years time. Just on, why does he say that? Why does he say that? Because of the breakdown. of the old US-Russia arms control projects in the sense that when you're dealing with two huge superpowers, you can manage risk much better than when you get a third of China, let alone when you start bringing in Saudi Arabia and other popular nationalist governments getting their own nuclear weapons. So, yeah, he would say, and this is what this mini-series on existential risk is about, making people think about uncomfortable things that aren't part of our

normal conversation. And he's saying, actually, people were right to be worried in the night. between 60s and we should be even more worried today. So final one on Saudi. The other thing that's now happened is predictably Trump has now reneged on the deal. So Trump has now just made a statement saying actually, and this is under pressure from Israel, Netanyahu is currently visiting. The eighth visit Netanyahu has made to Trump, and he's seen him eight times far more than any other leader. He's visiting for Lindsay Graham's funeral. Zillinsky's there as well, by the way. And yeah, coincidentally, in the lead-up to the visit, Trump has now announced, oh, actually Saudi Arabia can't get this unless it recognizes Israel and signs up to the Abraham Accords.

And he never expected them to enrich anyway. So 18 months of negotiation, signed, literally signed by the energy minister, is then undone two days later by Trump saying he rejects the whole thing. Okay. And what does the, what do the Saudis do about that? Well, do they just keep quiet? Yeah, they wait until he changes his mind again. Yeah. They keep going. They keep going.

And also, it's interesting, the agreement that he signed and then Renéged on or decided was no longer an agreement while BB's in town, it's got weaker inspection regimes by the atomic authorities than they even had before when they weren't doing this. So anyway, look, I think Hayden's on the money. I think this is one we should keep our eyes on and be a bit worried about it. And your point is right about energy. I mean, it's not like the UK kind of thinking where we're going to get all our future energy from. The Saudis are pretty well set, even with the difficulties in the current difficulties in the straight of Hormuz.

Okay, Roy, let's take a quick break. And then when I come back, I want to press you on your beloved AI data centers. Welcome back to the rest of politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Aleister Campbell. Now, Rory, let's get on to your passion, your obsession data centres. Joe from Cambridge, large parts of Europe are on fire. We talked about that in the main podcast. Much of the UK is in or close to drought.

Caroline Lucas talks about that in a brilliant mini-series. Climate breakdown is already threatening. Food security, water supplies and energy systems. Caroline talks about all those things, and these pressures will only intensify. So why are we planning to drill for more North Sea? oil, we don't yet know that we are for sure, and build large numbers of data centers that consume vast amounts of electricity and water while generating more heat. Food, water and resilient infrastructure are essential to life. AI and data centers are not. Love the show, but I have to

disagree, hopefully agreeably, with Rory on this. And doesn't Caroline's new miniseries make exactly this case? Look, look, it's a really good challenge, Alster. And it's one of the most important questions facing us and it's going to be really tough politics. The basic answer to the question is we really don't have any alternative other than to build these data centres. And you just got to work back from that. We can have a really good conversation about how we produce the electricity for them and where we cite them. It's completely true. They use a lot of electricity. They use a lot of water and you've got to be very smart about where you put them and how you run them. But we cannot not be build them, cannot not build them. Why? Because the foundation models, these large language models,

are going to be right at the heart of all our intelligence gathering around the world. They're going to be at the heart of all our defense systems, right? The whole future of warfare, all our military is going to run on these things. Our public services are going to run on these things. And if we find ourselves in a world in which we don't have the data centers, and if you don't have the data centers, you don't have the chips, you don't have the weights, you're not hosting these things, you're going to be in a situation where the complete foundation of everything in our lives, the way our companies work, the way our government works, where defense works, is dependent on chips, data centers and models hosted only in the US and China. And what does that

mean? Well, we know what that means. That means that President Trump can get out of the morning. He's actually done it. It's not just hypothetical. He's done it. Literally switch off our access the foundation models. He did it. And all our intelligence and security and our cyber defense were switched off for weeks while we were arguing with Trump to try to get it switched on again. They can also have a chokehold on us on pricing. You know, what's to stop them suddenly saying, oh, by the way, you're going to spend 10 times as much on this stuff as you were before? What's going to stop them saying, oh, by the way, you can't tweak your defense and security thing because it's controlled by U.S. export controls or some U.S. law is going to stop you doing it. It's just

not an option, right? If A.R. genuinely is the foundation of everything, we must have these things. Now, it's not just about the data center. That doesn't mean naively inviting in Google or OpenAI to just build a data center. We also need legal control. We need access to chips. We need to be able to own the weights and the models. We need backup systems. We're never going to have full independence, but the data centers are the foundation of our strategic autonomy. So I'm starting with that, and then we can solve the problems on the electricity in water. Okay, but I guess that's where Joe is coming from is about whether we can,

because a couple of things that in Caroline's latest episode, which is out on Friday, and honestly, I'll keep banging on about it, but I just think it's a brilliant series. She's interviewing this guy who makes the point that our government has removed the level of environmental impact assessment to something less than for far lesser projects, lesser environmentally challenging projects than this, added to which these AI companies, who when it was kind of trendy to be green, were all on for the kind of, you know, let's try and work to net zero, have dropped it because they're basically saying they can't do what they do this unless they have so much electricity and water. Can we at least draw it? And of course, this is where Trump is such a problem because he doesn't believe in, he does believe in drill, baby drill. He does worship fossil fuels. But can we, for example, find ways of absolute insistence that data center,

are driven exclusively by renewable energy. Is that possible? The problem is that the problem with renewables in general, which is that when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing, there's no electricity. And the data centre and the chips and the model needs to run 24 hours a day and needs to be cool 24 hours a day. And this is the problem.

And this is the thing that we don't talk about enough with renewable energy that unless you have enormous hydropower, and this actually is partly what the Saudis are saying, when you say to them you have huge solar, unless you have incredible storage capacity or you have hydropower and dams, which we also don't want to build for environmental reasons, you have to have the backup of fossil fuels to deal with a problem of what happens when the sun's up shining, with something. So you can't run data centers just on renewables. They're currently, let me just give you the figures, Roy, that according to the International Energy

Authority, fossil fuels supplies 60% of power to data centers, renewables 27, nuclear 15. So they are a massive user of fossil fuels. They're using, by 2030, it's reckoned that they're going to use water that would match the needs of 1.3 billion people. So we are talking about a scale of electricity and water use that... Let me begin by agreeing with you. So you're completely right that the electricity use is enormous. Globally, we're using about 415 terawatt hours, which is about 1.5% of global. consumption, and that's scheduled by 2030, not very long to come, four years' time, to be up to

3%. So to put that in context, steel is about 5% of global consumption, and steel is very, very big. So it's putting AI slightly below things like steel and the general kind of construction industry stuff, which gets up to sort of 8, 9%. UK, because we have much less industrial manufacturing, we basically deindustrialise, partly because of our push for net zero, partly because of our energy costs, so we don't have much industry. It's projected in the UK to get up to about 6% of UK electricity consumption. So if you were a planner, you'd have to say, does the technological revolution of AI, is it something that you're prepared to see is being broadly similar in importance to the global economy as steel production? or not, right? Water, water is a bit different. Water depends a lot on the kind of data center you're building and where you're building it. So some of the data centers in Britain use less water,

about 10,000 liters a year, which is less than your average leisure center. The big hypers data centers can be using 1.5 million, right, which is much, much more, I mean, a huge amount. But building a old-fashioned data center in Arizona, which is already water stressed in extreme heat, is completely different to building one in a much cooler place, for example, in northern Scandinavia, or building a data center in Scotland where there is ample waterfall. I mean, part of the problem is that we're pushing these data centers close to population centers, which is where people want them, in water stressed areas to southeast. If you were building them up in Northern Scotland, there would be enough water. But people don't want data centres up in the north because they want very low latency times, and they want reliability, they want to access some near-population. I would conclude, though, by saying it's a big problem, but don't stop data centres.

If we go down this line, Britain is on the path to poverty, economic irrelevance, total security collapse, and no part in the future of the economy if we allow this to happen. It's a much bigger version of the problem that Britain has building infrastructure in general. It's a much bigger version of fact we can't build houses. As you say, we've been talking about the third runways since 97. And it's the arguments against the real.

That's why I'm not calling them NIMBY arguments. But we have to build data centers. The biggest problem that Britain will face is not building data centers, not building them. I wish the people who were driving this were more open to the argument that you've just put, that yes, these challenges are real. So I don't even if you watched Elon Musk's car crash interview with Zanny Minton Beddows, the editor of The Economist, where he probably thought, oh, the economist, they probably think I'm an amazing genius.

She gave him a pretty hard time. Actually, not that hard a time. She asked him some robust questions. Her reward is to be condemned as a traitor to the West to his 75 squilly. and ex-f followers. But when I watched him talking about AI, where he just said, we've got to look on the bright side.

Enjoy the ride. Enjoy the ride. There's inexorable progress. Even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn't. And I don't trust these people. I don't trust these people because they don't make these arguments about accepting there might be risks,

accepting that people might have other views. So yes, I get with you. We've got to get with the program. But if only they would actually show some sign of understanding that we are going to have to come up with better ideas on renewables. We are going to have to find a way to get water. I mean, even this week, I don't know, look,

it could have been completely unrelated to all this. But I don't even if you saw it, it was actually one of the best laughs of the week, even though it was very serious. Gatwick Airport ran out of water, so the toilets couldn't flush and there was no drinking water. And John Crace, tweet of the week, he said, ah, they've taken all the water to Manchester.

I thought that was very, very, very funny. But it is really serious. It is, when you look at the figures of what's being used, when you think about how close we are here to drought at the moment, and oh, what's his face, restore, Rupert Lowe. If you saw his picture of a big field, presumably that he owns, terrible harvest, terrible harvest, when is the government going to do something about the poor harvest?

Well, I just wonder whether climate change has anything to do with you, poor harvest. So I just think we've got to be honest about the scale of the risk. At least you're saying there's a problem. Okay. Most of when I'm listening to these AI tech gods talking about it, they're kind of, they think that people like Joe, who's asking the question, just kind of, you know, modern world Luddites. The Lydite thing is terrifying. And you're completely right. When I'm not getting disinvited from American conferences that talk about AI, one of the things that I think has been terrifying is that Elon Musk line

we're just along for the ride and you've just got to accept it and I couldn't do anything about it if I wanted I mean there's a question here from Oliver is a trip past man from Cambridge given OpenAI's Newsweek that chatGB's cyberhack to start up without permission from its human guardians is it time to go home lock the door

turn everything off close the curtains and sit tight for the rest of our lives. Look, there's a really serious question here. I mean, you could come back and be patronizing and say, no, no, no, don't worry, this is all nonsense. And this is like that stuff. Actually, it is a big, big problem. I mean, Open AI developed this thing that was supposed to be in a secure sandbox,

in other words, isolated from the rest of the world. And it broke out. And it thought it could cleverly hack a test that it was about to get from Open. AI by breaking into another website and trying to access all the information from that website in order to get through. Now, the point is not what it did. What it did wasn't inherently dangerous, but it was dishonest. It was manipulative.

It jumped around systems. And apply those qualities to what happens if it wanted to do something wickeder, right? What happens if it wanted to mount its own cyber attacks for whatever reason? what happens if it wanted to generate, etc. So there is a big, big question about two different types of risk. One is evil humans using AI to do bad things, right? A terrorist group using AI to build a bioweapon. And the second is the question about the AI itself autonomously doing things that its human guardians didn't want that are also dangerous.

And we cannot, cannot, cannot just continue in a world in which we say, well, there's nothing. we can do about it. Or what a lot of these companies say, which is, it would be a nice idea if somebody regulated us, but we're not going to regulate ourselves because our competitors are not being regulated. And there's the beginnings of a change. The change when the US government started moving against Anthropic, now that was partly almost certainly Trump having a beef against Anthropic, but there was a process of trying to test their models before it's released. there's been a demand from Demis Hsas Sibis, the British Nobel Prize winner and the founder of Deep Mind to say that we should begin to think about an international body to regulate this stuff.

We have to. We have to. Because the idea that companies can regulate themselves has been nonsense from the tobacco companies in the 1950s to the polluting factories of the 60s and 70s. It's madness. And as you say, the idea that Elon Musk can somehow be trusted is, complete insanity. Now, there are a lot of questions about how you regulate, who regulates, and of course, it's all about the US and China, because Britain just being pious and saying, we're going to regulate ourselves completely irrelevant because we don't have the frontier models, and all we'll do is we'll take ourselves out of the AI, right? And the problem is it's the worst possible time because it's Trump. Sorry, over you. Well, the EU are doing their thing.

Australia is doing its thing. South Korea, Japan, as you say, national. But in the end, this is a bit like nuclear proliferation. It's only going to be this an international agreement. And as you say, with Trump, with China. But interesting that Xi Jinping, when he saw Trump, they did sort of have the beginnings of the, of the conversation about this. I must tell you, Roy, you know we talked before about how we regularly get asked to put our quotes on the front of cover of books to say, this is a fantastic read, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have been asked.

And in fact, I've just been asked, they've asked if they can use something that I said on the podcast to go on the front cover of penguins' publication of the Pope's encyclical on AI. No. Oh, how proud am I? That's pretty good. For somebody who doesn't want to be in the House of Lords, that's about as close as you can get, I think. Oh, I think, well, I mean, look, I think if, and I've, of course, given them permission,

and I think when it comes out, if the Pope wants to do any media, as they launched this penguin version of his encyclical, love to have him on the podcast. I know I keep banging on about it, but I'm going to do another plug. If you want to go deep, deep, deep, into this debate about water and AI data centers and the whole issue of water security,

this week's episode of when nature becomes a security threat, Caroline Lucas is all about this. You sign up at the rest is politics.com. And I'm going to use this opportunity for a brutal plug and challenge us to not to interrupt or mock me in the middle of my plug. And I'll try to make this my final big plug. But 13th September, I'm doing a live show where we're going to be looking at a lot of these biggest use of social care, localism, etc.

Dominion Theatre, London. There are still some tickets left. I'll be on the stage with Lewis Goodall. Your podcast apprentice. My podcast, apprentice. We're going to try to make as live as possible. Tickets still available and really would love to get the conversation going about what you think Britain should be doing in terms of policy, but we'll do it.

some international stuff as well. Do hope some of you can come and join me and Lewis Goodall and the way to sign up is to go to Fane, that's F-A-N-E-E-D-C-O-D-U-K, Rory Stewart. It's called Middlelands, evening with Rory Stewart, Dominion Theatre, London, 13th September and another event which is almost sold out in Richmond on the 14th. Rory and the Apprentice. Rory and the Apprentice. Following on from your Pope plug, a question for Emily, Have you read all these books which you blurb? Now, can I just quickly, before you answer that question, I just said little reference to agents and publishers.

I don't know whether there was something weird about last week. I opened my email. I got nine books in one day. To plug. To plug. And I think in the week, I think I got 19 books. Now, I'm trying to live a life here. Do people realistically think I'm going to be able to read 19 books in a week and do my normal day job?

Rory, the 19 books probably have 19 publishers. So they don't, it's not one guy sending you 19 books. I mean, if you come to our kitchen, if you're going to regularly complain, every day, are you actually going to read any of these books, right? And sometimes I do. But there's an amnesty bookshop, not far from here. I just take them down there in crates every few weeks so that you can find a use for them.

What's your normal formula to get out? Because one of the problems is that if I've made the mistake of, for example, praising on the podcast a book, that the same writer will then come back to me a year later. He's written another book. He said, oh, you like my last book. Here's another one. So there's a sort of accelerating system going on here.

Well, what I do, if I try and read the book if somebody sends me. And, you know, I'm not, I can read a few pages and decide whether I think I'm going to like it or not. I'm actually reading at the moment a manuscript that was sent to me for a book that's not even published yet by Johann Harry. Now, I'm always going to read something by him because I loved his book chasing the screen. And I'm about a quarter of the way through this book. And I've already decided, if he wants a quote for the cover, I'll give it because it's brilliant. It's this extraordinary story of he was in Las Vegas.

and he discovered this network like a city in the tunnels below Las Vegas. Okay? Of just so many people living down there. And then serial killers who were taking lots of them out. It's an amazing read. So I'll give that one. So that's that. But then most, what I normally do, Rory, if I can't be bothered or if I don't want to, you know, say I've read something when in truth I haven't, I'll just say, look, I'm sure you understand.

I get lots of these offers. I'm very, very selective. I pursue certain themes. that are a particular interest to me, and I'm afraid yours doesn't fit. That's good. Okay, well, little shout out for one of them that I did tackle this week, which is Nick Harkaway, who's John LaCarrie's son, has written a new George Smiley novel called The Taperman.

Nick Huckaway is an incredible novelist in his own right. Really lovely novels, things like titanium noir. But it's uncanny. I don't know whether Rory could do this for you. He really has caught his father's voice. It's very, very difficult to believe this isn't LeCari himself, writing the Smiley novel. He's got so much the environment of the circus and the 60s and 70s. So a little shout out for Nick Harkways, the taperman on its way out. Excellent. Excellent. Question from Sam.

Did you watch the Trump speech at the White House Correspondence Dinner, Alistair? Did you watch it? No, I didn't, Alist. Tell us about it. I sent it to you. Why didn't you watch it? Because at the last moment, you sent me something just before I was about a watch hit, saying the wildfires is a much bigger story. So I've That's true. That's true. That's true. Oh, God. I watched it because two or three people said,

have you watched this? It's the worst yet. It was just horrible. What was it? Was it the thing where Obama dropped his mic? Is it the White House correspondence to know? Yeah. And wasn't it recently?

Didn't they have a security threat where people ran in? Yeah. So this was the rewrite. For his first term, he refused to do it. First president, he refused to do it. He decided in his second. term now that he's sort of, you know, back in, he decided to do it. And then there was this terrorist scare, this guy came in with a gun and off he went. So they had to cancel it.

And then, so this was the rerun, okay. And it was over an hour long. Never a good thing. That's the real Gaddafi Castro. Yeah, he'd had to sit there and watch journalists being given awards, including a guy who was given the award for his continuing exposure. of the president's links to Jeffrey Epstein. So Trump just sat there like this with his eyes closed, sort of just, and he looked at Caroline Levitt and shrugged, shrugging what I have you. Caitlin Collins got an award, CNN. So he did a horrible, horrible, horrible thing about her. Back to, you know, why do you never smile? You've got a lovely face. Why do you have a smile? Just because you work at CNN fake news. He abused so many people. Bruce Springsteen,

Bette Midler, Joe Biden, all the, you know, usual kind of, it was like a combination between a MAGA rally and a kind of deranged rant from an 113-year-old uncle in the corner of the room. He went on and on about his fucking ballroom and how that was going to be great and how thick the windows were. So if he was doing this speech in the ballroom and somebody tried to shoot him, the bullet would just bounce off the window, all this kind of crazy stuff. And how are the journalists, how the journalists looking to all this? because presumably they're not a MAGA audience that are used to a one-hour random rant about nonsense.

I was, because it was packed with, you know, Stephen Miller was there and so a lot of MAGA people were there. I'd say that as it went on, even the MAGA people were starting to think, this is just embarrassing. He told this actually quite funny joke towards the end, and nobody laughed. Gone, what's the joke? Well, the joke was, he was talking about how these octogenarians,

which, by the way, he is, in Congress. And he told this story about a senator who arrived home and his wife-slash-mistress was at the top of the stairs and said, you know, I want you to run upstairs and make love to me. And he said, well, I can do one, but I can't do both. That's very good. Which is funny, right? But by then, by then, the whole audience was just drained of energy,

couldn't stand listening to any more. Lots about fake news, lots of gaslighting, endlessly talking about how you really won the election against Biden. I mean, it was just absolutely totally horrible. And he then had this whole thing about, you know, the terrorist guy who tried to, you know, get into when it was there. He said, this was an attempt, an assault on our democracy. Well, January the 6th, anybody, he kept, he obviously had an auto cue in a script, but he just, kept going off for these long rambling riffs that were just embarrassing. I found the whole thing embarrassing. I honestly did start to think, this guy's really not well. He had this horrible

joke about Biden as well. He was talking about something when somebody became unconscious. Remember the guy, it's now the photograph of the year, you know, when the guy fainted in his office and Trump just stands there quite irritated. And he said, before that, all you had to to see somebody unconscious was to ask Joe Biden a question. Just horrible, horrible. By the way, we haven't given many reading recommendations. I passionately recommend Hunter Biden's substack about his dad and how his dad dealt with hunters, tried to deal with Hunter's addictions.

It's one of the best things I've read for a long, long time. Bet Midler, Jane Fonda, they got it. Don Lemon, Barrack Hussein, O'Barrick, Hussein, who say, you know, It was all the greatest hits, but it was just sort of, it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing. Fake tapper, Gavin Newscum, Pocohontas, went on and on and on. Well, let me finish as we come to the end of this. We're going to go jolly.

I did slightly softball it on the park run. So for the very small minority of people who don't go on park runs, it's literally the most lovely thing in the world. And it's rather a wonderful story. It was set up in Britain, in Bushy Park, just over 20 years ago, single event. Now at 9.30 in the morning, in sort of almost every town in Britain and increasingly across the world, I think there's now something like 9 million people running simultaneously every day. You turn up, and it's just lovely.

There were people pushing prams. I took an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old with me. There were people who were old. There were people who were young, overweight, underweight, every different type of background. And it's just lovely. But it makes you optimistic about Britain. I mean, the volunteers, the people participating.

And the very basic fact, which is obviously, it's really good for people's health to run 5K. Who started it? Do you know who started it? It was founded by a man called Paul Sinton-Huit in 2004. He'd been depressed. and he was trying to work out what to do in 2004. He was unemployed and he had an injured leg.

And so he set it up. It's just so brilliant. I mean, if you're looking for a way of changing the world, there have now been a million of these things with 10 million people running. So, yeah, you need to come up with an idea like that. I'm with you on the encyclical. I'm with you on percivillians. But to really change the world, you need an idea like a park run.

Okay. Yeah, I'll come up with something. Come on an idea like that, yeah. I guess something? Yeah, I guess something. My, I don't know if this is Percivilias, but my favorite thing this week was, do you know who Sadio Man has? No. He's a very famous footballer.

I half guessed that he was probably a very famous footballer. Okay, okay. So he was interviewed somewhere, and people noticed that his iPhone was cracked. Okay. So there was lots of stuff on. You know, you're a multi-millionaire. Why have you got a cracked iPhone? okay and this is reply why would I want ten ferrari's 20 diamond watches and two jet planes what would

that do for the world I starved I worked in the fields I played barefoot I didn't go to school now I can help people I prefer to build schools and give poor people food and clothing I have built schools and I've built a stadium we provide clothes shoes and food for people in extreme poverty In addition, I give 70 euros a month to people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips or planes. I prefer that my people receive a little of what life has given me. So lovely, so lovely.

And a little connection to two things which are really close for hearts that... Give directly! Give directly, number one. I mean, that's what he's talking about. He's somebody who's come from extreme poverty and understands. how much difference a small cash contribution can make to someone's life. And actually literally $900 or $1,000 can totally transform somebody's life and give them the choices and options. But there's also a link to Andy Burnham and localism, subsidiarity and trusting people,

which is that what, you know, give directly and the Andy Burnham philosophy have in common is a basic idea that local people know more, care more, can do more than distant officials, that you can trust people. to fix their own problems, and you just need to give them the resources and the opportunities to do that. So that's a lovely thing to close on, because it links all our themes together. But it doesn't quite deal with some of the stuff around Saudi nuclear proliferation, Modi's populism, cracking, AI shuddering, consuming the world's environmental resources, etc. So somehow, as you said in the episode yesterday, we have to balance a real trust in local people solving things with a recognition that Camden Council can't have a Navy. There are some global issues that require some global cooperation. Camden Council is going to be so cross with me. What do you mean we can't have a Navy?

We should have a Navy. All right, Roy. See you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.