128: Tales From The Crypto

Less carbs, more crushing it.

That's what you get with Egg Life Egg White Wraps.

When your schedule awakens from its summer slumber, turn every meal into a chance to level up your protein game.

We're talking bring it on breakfast tacos, ready-to-roll wraps, and power-packed PBJs.

Egg Life Egg White Wraps, the winning play in your mealtime playbook.

Egg Life, sneaky protein.

Find us chilling in the fridge at Aldi, Target, Whole Foods, and more.

For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

Sir, in the orange, phone away, please.

Um, my Kidd of Smart Smoke Alarm sent an alert through the Ring app.

See?

The train monitoring agent is calling now.

Hello?

The Kida Smart Smoke Alarm sends real-time mobile alerts in the Ring app.

And with a subscription, emergency help can be requested even when you're not home.

A compatible Ring subscription is required for 24-7 smoke and carbon monoxide monitoring, sold separately.

Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Eye Office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Matt Muir.

I'm thrilled to be back.

Cut that.

I'm sorry, yeah.

And we're delighted to have you.

No, it's really great.

Great, yeah, yeah, okay.

So we're here to talk about lots of stuff that's going to be or has recently been in the news in between mags.

But first, there is a nice update to the last episode, which covered a lot of ecclesiastical matters.

And there has been a victory for the eye.

No, in fact, a victory for page 94.

I've got to add him almost personally, I would say, on this film.

Okay, so the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned, which you covered on the last podcast.

He did.

You mentioned that he was still doing the Christmas services.

Still planning on putting on the nice frock and doing the Christmas services, yes.

Which he's since dropped out of doing.

And the last issue of the magazine mentioned that the Archbishop of Canterbury teddies are still available in the Canterbury gift shop, in the trademark Welby specs and with the trademark Eaton history.

So

that was just a lovely little story, but there has been a further development since then.

Is that right, Adam?

Yes, he made his resignation speech in the House of Lords, because, as Helen pointed out, all those bishops still got a say in our government.

He made the most...

extraordinarily tin-eared resignation speech, didn't he?

No, no, no.

He said the thing is, if you want to make God laugh, and I know a lot about that as an archbishop, then you make plans.

So I had a lot of plans for next year, actually.

They won't be happening.

I mean, this is honestly genuinely the tone of it.

He said, the person I really feel sorry for is my diary secretary.

If you're going to pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary.

The crashing sound of no violins breaks out in sympathy.

Just extraordinary.

And then he kept saying things like, you know, someone was technically in charge.

He used the phrase technically in charge.

That's what you are if you're Archbishop of Canterbury.

Now, you're technically in charge.

Wow.

Yeah, and said someone's head had to roll, and I suppose it had to be mine.

I mean, it was all the way through.

It was basically like, I'm annoyed about this.

I actually had a lot of exciting frock wearing planned for next year.

It's been ruined by you people.

But I guess someone had to take responsibility.

I guess it had to be me.

It is very Greg Wallace.

It's bespectacled bald man, not really apologising.

And then it was an absolute Greg Wallace because he then, just as Greg Wallace did, the very next day, he had to apologise and say he'd got the tone of it wrong and he was extremely sorry.

He might be showing some repentance for the first time in this entire affair.

Yeah, and there was a bishop sitting next to him who had her head in her hands, who I believe, Adam, is this right?

Is she the Bishop of London who's only the Bishop of London because, well, we didn't get Paula Vennels's.

Second choice to Paula Vennels.

I mean, you might well have your head in your hands, wouldn't you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vennels was sort of nailed on for the job.

He wanted to give the job of Bishop to London.

We wrote about this at the time, to Paula Vennels, head of the post office and chief villain in the post office scandal.

Which, I mean, give you an early measure of the HR conchance.

Anyway, he's gone now.

He's not going to be on your telly over Christmas.

He's not going to be doing the New Year's message.

So I think the rule of this is don't mess with page 94.

Fantastic.

Okay, and if you want to deliver the Christmas message, you can apply now.

We'll do details at the end of the show.

So let's get into the business of this week's podcast, and we're going to start off from Canterbury to crypto.

Seamless.

Seamless.

Matt, there have been a lot of stories about crypto recently.

There's been a huge scandal in the UK this week about a money laundering crypto gang that has been smashed and it's got roots stretching all the way back to Moscow.

But one of the main reasons people are interested in it at the moment is that crypto is suddenly back in an enormous way because Donald Trump is going to, I believe, establish a US Federal Reserve of he's going to turn Fort Knox into a Bitcoin.

We're all going to be using imaginary internet money in the future.

That's basically that, Andy, that's all you need to know, fundamentally.

I suppose we sort of need to start with a basic explanation of what we mean when we say crypto.

Most simply, it's a bunch of different currencies, and I use this in inverted commas because they, as a general rule, are not backed by any bank or government,

as Helen said, generated through the cryptographic process and which exist on the blockchain, an immutable decentralized ledger of transactions, which means that A, you can own them anonymously,

B, you can transfer them anonymously, and C, in theory, every transaction that is taken using money that's on the blockchain, cryptocurrency, can be tracked and is there forever.

So it's a way of authenticating ownership or purchases or something like that.

Okay, so we have this anonymous, slightly sketchy pseudocurrency whose value fluctuates wildly.

And there are many, many, many different variants of them.

The one that everyone has heard of is Bitcoin.

That was the original one that was invented by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

But various things have, as the terminology goes, forked off that.

So there's Ethereum, which is very big, which is what tended to be used by all of the NFTs that listeners may remember were briefly very, very buzzy around about the time of lockdown.

And NFTs, just to quickly bracket in that, non-fungible tokens.

And they were pictures of monkeys.

Which were largely but not exclusively pictures of monkeys.

Yes, you were paying a lot of money for a JPEG.

All of this is completely mad.

I know, I'm sure our listeners to the podcast will be deeply invested in the meme coin scene, but it's very hard to understand why this is relating to the real world and to American fiscal policy.

The thing that's important to remember about cryptocurrencies as they currently stand is that they are, whilst they can be used for the storing of large volumes of money, etc., they are, in the main, used as incredibly volatile gambling tools

and to launder money, as you mentioned at the top, as was revealed in the FTA of the weekend, and very, very often to buy drugs.

I mean, the main reason back in the early days of Bitcoin, why anyone would invest in Bitcoin, was to be able to

buy drugs on the dark web.

So, football trading cards, you're like, you know, Panini stickers, don't have any inherent value, but everybody together decides that some like the special golden one is going to be worth £10,000.

And as long as you can find a buyer for that special golden one, but what happens is there are these things called meme coins.

So Doge is an example of that.

Everybody who likes a certain meme gets very excited about them.

They sell a coin related to it.

And as long as you can find somebody who is willing to keep buying in and keep buying in, the price goes up, up, and up.

So they become the site of what is called pump and dumps, which is when I say I'm issuing Helen coin and everyone needs to get in on the ground floor because this one's going to the moon.

It's going to be massive.

And then all the, let's be honest, thousands and thousands of Helen fans buy my Helen coin.

Yeah.

I sell it off, make a massive profit.

I've pumped it up by talking about how amazing it is, and then I dump all of my stock in it, well, all of my investment in it.

And the value crashes, and all of the Helen fans lose their shirts.

But I still get that money in real, actual money.

Right.

And why is America now going Hell for Leather on this, please?

Well,

so partly because of the Donald,

despite having previously indicated scepticism as to the

scam.

Yeah, he said he said he said literally it was used to buy drugs and donald famously does not like drugs

he's sort of right about that though right a hundred percent right a lot of it is a scam um except weirdly that's the answer i was looking for that's what it is right okay yeah it's a scam right

except weirdly over the course of the past four years pretty much since effectively covid uh florida has become one of the intellectual centers of of Bitcoin.

A lot of the people that are heavily into cryptocurrency, the speculation around cryptocurrency, and promoting it as a viable financial alternative system, have congregate in Florida, which is coincidentally where Donald Trump has spent a significant portion of the last four years.

Now, if you're someone like Donald Trump, who is fundamentally at heart something of a larger-than-life huckster personality,

what better vehicle for someone than a currency that is largely memetic, based on nothing more than vibes, and which can, if you treat it properly, stand to make you, as the person at the top of the pyramid of it, quite astonishingly wealthy.

Right.

He did a lo-fi version of this in that he sold actual like digital trading cards so they were kind of essentially NFTs featuring him in various AI generated poses looking butch.

And then if you bought the full set you got a piece of the suit that he was wearing when he got shot.

So this was like panini stickers that we used to trade at.

But that's how I just honestly is the way to think about all these things.

Like all money really, unless it's backed by a government, they have no value apart from what someone will agree that the value is, right?

It's a kind of collective agreement about it.

The market decides what the value is.

This is taking me back to a very upsetting time for me in 1997, trying to get the entirety of the Liverpool football squad in Panini sticker form.

Do the words got, got, need, still fill you with a terrible sense of anxiety?

They certainly do.

Yeah, so this is.

I'm starting to get it.

The problem about it is that obviously lots of people bought in Bitcoin 10 years ago when it was valued much less and have made whopping great fortunes in it.

So everybody thinks that they can be the person that does that.

And this is technically known as the greater fool theory, I believe, where you're trying to find someone who's a bigger Muppet than you to take these over-inflated things off your hands.

There's something really interesting about the extent to which this plays into a wider set of themes in American and, frankly, broader Western culture.

Again, this feels very much like things that have happened since 2019.

It feels like things that fermented during COVID, that bubbled up as a result of people having a lot of time on their hands, some people having a significant amount of disposable income because of reduced costs during that time, deciding that they were going to use those to speculate and invest wildly in these, at the time, excitingly frothy things.

It was NFTs then, now it's meme coins.

And it's also linked into things like the deregulation of online gambling in the States, which has created a, frankly, terrifying situation of

fairly febrile speculation around sports betting, which, you know, if you're not in sports, you don't need to be.

If you're in celebrities, just buy your favorite celebrity's meme coin and hope that in 24 hours you've multiplied your investment by 100 rather than lost your entire house.

And the reason that there's a political angle in it is that all of the big established banks have been to some extent creeping towards investing in it.

So Howard Lutnick, who was the Trump transition chair and will be a Secretary of Commerce, has invested in a fund that has a holding in, I think, Tether, which is one of the stable coins.

And Trump now has David Sachs, who was in the all-in podcast.

He's one of the so-called PayPal Mafia, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

That kind of group of investors that got very big at the end of the 1990s.

He is now going to be Trump's crypto czar.

There's a huge amount of pressure from people in Silicon Valley who like this deregulated finance that's outside the traditional financial system for it to become accepted.

The problem is that

they've got fortunes to lose and gamble.

The reason that we have, for example, things like deposit protections is because for people lower down the chain, if you put £40,000, if you put your kids' college fund, if you put your mortgage payment, you don't tell your wife about it, into a meme coin and suddenly it turns out it's not as funny as you thought it was, no one comes to save you.

and this is what I think is interesting in terms of the British aspect to this, which is that obviously legislation lags quite a long way behind the reality of what people are doing.

So Parliament have just legislated that Bitcoin and other digital assets are considered personal property.

But that was this year.

So that's that they are sort of having to catch up quite fast.

And I think it's 12% of British adults now own crypto in some form or another.

And a third of people who own crypto who were surveyed said, well, if something went wrong, I could raise a complaint with the Financial Conduct Authority.

And that's the problem.

You can't because they're not regulated, as you say, by the Financial Conduct Authority.

You know, do you want to allow people to do this but regulate what they're doing?

Or do you just simply want to say to them, look, this is really risky.

You stand to lose everything.

Yeah, my bank, when I'm my banking app, when I pay people, I don't know if you've seen this, but it has a pop-up.

And all the pop-ups of all the things you might be doing, one of them is, are you paying for cryptocurrency?

And I did press that once, and it was like, it kind of went, woo, woo!

Are you absolutely sure you want to hand hand over all your money to someone that you've just met on the internet?

That often turns out badly.

It's interesting the extent to which this is also very much a young people thing and one might argue a young people problem.

A young man problem, I think.

A young man problem, I think that's talking about this kind of culture of like you listen to these podcasts that are very male and you, you know.

Not these, not this podcast.

Not this podcast.

Well, this podcast is quite male.

I disagree, actually.

But you know, but it's like it's a whole lifestyle because it's seen as being risk-taking, right?

And the whole Trump thing is very much like we're men, men take risks.

Women are like the HR department constantly going like, uh-uh, uh, but like, that's what men do.

They put their money into Hawk to a girl's meme coin.

Now, I think for Adam's benefit, we should explain what Hawk to a girl's meme coin because all of this, imagine having this conversation in 2015.

It's ridiculous.

You could, I know what a girl is, okay, I think.

I know what a coin is.

I'm okay with those two.

All right.

Should we start with hawk to a hawk to to a girl rugged a meme coin.

Oh dear.

Okay, there's an

I'm just going to zone out at this point.

There's a new American celebrity whose name is Haley Welch.

She is known as the Hawk Tour Girl.

And here's the BBC explanation of who she is.

This is from the BBC News website.

Known online as the Hawk to a girl, Ms.

Welch went viral after speaking the onomatopoeia Hawk Tour, imitating the sound of someone spitting during an interview in June.

It made the 22-year-old from Belfast, Tennessee, an overnight sensation.

So why would someone be spitting during an interview in June?

There's context here.

It was the answer was about whether or not were one to perform a sex act which cannot be described on a family podcast, how would you make that good?

And she said you would hawk to her and spit on that thing.

And that was enough to now she has a podcast called Talk Tour.

Which, in fairness, is a very, very good title.

But obviously, she's got some very smart people behind her who have d di worked out all the ways that you can make money out of the kind of modern internet.

One of which is having a podcast and and adverts and all of that.

She's got a dating app that she released last month, which is in no way special, but requires subscription to use because her fans might want to meet other of her fans via an officially sanctioned dating app.

Great.

It's like the Matt Hancock app.

It is like Matt Hancock.

It's like the classified ads in private eyes.

Oh, okay.

We can put it that way.

And she recently, in fact, within the last week, I believe,

launched her own crypto coin.

Right.

We had this podcast for quite a while now, guys, and we don't have our own dating app or our own Bitcoin.

What are we doing?

I don't know.

You're absolutely right.

I should have page 94 coin.

But who, I mean, I like to think though.

Sir Herbert Gusset would put absolutely everything

into the gusset coin.

Oh, gusset coin.

Come on, that's good.

Come on.

We were doing memes before the internet.

And the problem was that after Welsh launched this cryptocurrency coin,

various people piled in and then it lost 95% of its value.

Right.

So everyone who'd invested

lost their gussets.

Well, that one assumes that Ms.

Welch hasn't.

Probably not.

I think her lawyers suggest that she, any such suggestion, would be deeply defamatory.

But yes, I think someone has clearly been on the right side of this trade for all the people who've been on the wrong side of it.

It speaks to something about kind of how modern fandom works and how there are now so many creators who build direct these parasocial relationships, and you become a kind of figure through having your own podcast, through having your own dating app, you know,

the sort of all the brand extensions.

And we hear about Hawk Tuergir because it's amusing to explain to your parents who that is.

But there are.

I'm not your dad.

For the purposes of this conversation.

That's the figure.

Not your podcast dad when Ian's not here.

What's kind of fascinating about it is that this is a story that will have been repeated all over the place.

I mean, Elon Musk used to pump Dogecoin all the time.

I just think we should put down a marker now, but unfortunately, people are going to be hearing a lot more about this because it's going to become deeply involved.

What's there not, Andy?

We've talked about government regulation and things, but I remember you doing a couple of stories a few years back when Rishi Sunak was in the Treasury about launching an official British crypto.

The idea was discussed and then I think it was kicked into the long grass.

I think GB coin, as I believe it was possibly coined,

is still theoretically floating about as a potential.

Like all the other ones.

Yeah, it's theoretically floating.

But I mean, what is also interesting about this is that,

as Helen's saying, this is driven by US culture and US politics, but it is very much a problem over here as well, or it will become more of a problem over here as well, because whilst the main markets for these things, the main people who create these coins, are often these very very big high-profile international celebrities that come out of the US and who are very memetic there is then this secondary layer of grift which is all of the people who are attempting to make a living by attempting to sell information about this stuff and sell the get-rich-quick schemes and to get a little bit of side cash for promoting these things so the number of influencers influencers again use the inverted commas in the uk are making a lot of money out of promoting really a lot of these schemes.

So, I mean, last month alone, the FSA, which as of last year now regulates advertising around this space,

they've had interviews under caution with 20 influencers for misrepresenting crypto deals, not being accurate about risk, et cetera.

But, I mean, I think it's fair to say that 20 is

a drop in the ocean.

It's very easy to go on.

I briefly went on.

reluctantly went on X this morning.

Just have a quick look at the sort of people who are currently as of today flogging this stuff on X.

And what's fascinating about it is that all of them have in their biographies words like,

definitely not advising consumers in the UK, definitely not giving financial advice, proceed with caution.

But also, book a free strategy call with me.

So what's fascinating about this is that a lot of these people are avoiding regulation by A, putting disclaimers on stuff that they put on social media.

Whether or not the disclaimers you might think are adequate is open to debate, but still they are at least ostensibly attempting to abide by the letter of the law.

But then, at various other points, directing people who follow them to channels on Telegram or channels on Discord, which the regulator can't see, and which is basically a small closed community where one bloke at the top tells a load of people, hey guys, why don't you chuck a few hundred quid into this this week?

Why I'm interested when you say 12% of British people hold crypto because I wonder how many of those percentage think that they hold crypto.

Because you quite often read now in the consumer champion bits of the money page, someone will get taken in by a scammer who says, give me some money, I'll send you a screenshot showing that I've got it in in my crypto wallet right and how many people actually have a level of sophistication to know that that could just be a screenshot anyone's crypto wallet they never have direct access to it so what about these magic beans that i've got i mean

hold on to them yeah mic you're open to something

running a business online look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from godaddy Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs, from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with GoDaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash GDNow.

Again, go daddy.com slash GDNow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site, go daddy.com slash GDNow.

Scratched furniture?

It happens.

But when your canine patients can't stop scratching themselves, you'd know the signs of allergies anywhere.

Luckily, Hill's prescription diet ZD Dog Food is made with hydrolyzed protein to help reduce skin irritation, scratching, and digestive issues, with nutrition to support visible improvement in skin and coat in 30 days.

With Active Biome Plus digestion technology to promote gut health for dogs with food sensitivities, your patients can get back to feeling good and getting up to no good.

Intended for veterinary professionals.

From the giddy heights of meme coins and crypto, Adam, tell us what's going on at The Observer.

Right over to Old Media, the oldest liberal paper in the country.

Was it 1791, I think, first set up?

Yes, well, it is going.

It was confirmed last week that the Scott Trust, owners of The Guardian and maintainers of The Guardian in perpetuity, but not the Observer, have given the initial go-ahead to the deal with Tortoise Media to sell off The Observer.

And they did this on the second day of a strike by Observer and Guardian staff, just sort of to add insult to a lot of injury that was already being felt over there.

So you've covered this recently on the pod, but this is all developments since then, right?

Yep, yep, yep.

This is in the week since we were last

in the fortnight since the last podcast.

Yes, this is the last time.

I mean, last time we had a media misery roundup, and this now is very much the flagship misery because they are very unhappy, aren't they?

It's a special Christmas misery, isn't it?

Yeah, last week in Private Eye, we quoted the former Guardian critic Philip Hope Wallace and his advice that you should never work for a liberal employer because they will sack you on Christmas Eve.

Well, just ahead of Christmas comes the news that, yes, the Observer is being offloaded.

I mean, we're talking about this in terms of a sale.

Actually,

still quite murky, a lot of the details on this, but some of the things that have emerged last week.

One is that one of the people that the Guardian media group are selling the Observer to is the Scott Trust, who are going to be one of the investors in the new thing.

They are putting in £5 million to the market.

The Scott Trust.

So wait, the Observer is partially buying the Observer.

The Observer's owners.

The Scott Trust are selling

the Observer partially to the Scott Trust.

Yes.

I think they get a good price for it.

Quite weird.

Well, £5 million.

That was kind of got out of them slightly under sufferance at the meeting of journalists with management last week.

So So why would they do that?

I think that was done because the feeling among the observer staff was that they were selling off the paper to a pretty dicey prospect.

And the Tortoise is a startup and has relied on funding rounds.

And there was a feeling that the Observer was therefore going to back this startup by saying, well, look, we'll give them a cash injection so they're much more likely to survive.

The anger from the Observer staff came from the kind of this is essentially softly shutting the observer because its staff has been run down for a while.

It hasn't had its own web presence.

So, I think their feeling was that this is a kind of you know, this is you offloading it, getting off your hands, and you don't really care what happens to it.

In order to assuage that, the Scottra said, Well, look, we're gonna we're willing to put some money in that makes it much more likely that this brand will survive long term.

I think that feeling was probably best expressed in the meeting last week by Charles Gurassa, who's the chair of the Guardian Media Group.

He used a really weird passive voice construction.

He said, The observer is much smaller and it's found it much more difficult to obtain the investment it requires in recent years, which is why it then has to be

a bit like staffing someone for a few years.

And they say, gosh, you're looking terribly thin, aren't you?

Do you want to know who some of the other investors are who are piling in to Tortoise to put up the money for the Observer?

Of course.

One is Yellowwood, which is a private equity company, which, as far as I can see, specializes mostly in investing in shower gels and makeup.

And as we all know, private equity makes every business that it invests in better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely stuff.

Standard Investment, who do have some media investments.

They're behind Graydon Cartage,

Vanity Fair Editors, Airmail thing, which is like a weekly

center.

Yeah, and a few other things.

Malcolm Gladwell's podcast company as well, they've invested quite a bit.

Rushkin Industries.

That's the one, yep, yep, yep.

So there is also some reasoning behind that.

This day, which turns out not to be private equity, it's actually a charitable foundation set up by Gary Lubner, who is a big donor to the Labour Party.

And also, the last one I've got on my list is Phillion Capital.

So all of this money is going into tortoise, is going through the tortoise actually, and coming out the other end.

Through the tortoise.

out at the other end.

So,

what is the prospect for the actual observer hacks who are going to be parceled up and transported over to tortoise?

Well, this was the other big development of last week because they are not necessarily all going to be parceled up.

You'll remember from our last podcast, listeners, that we were talking about the amazing deal that all Guardian Observer staff have with between their union and management there, where there can be no compulsory redundancies whatsoever.

So, they run a

fantastically cushy agreement, which is unusual for most workplaces.

They have managed to get written in as as part of this deal the fact that all existing terms and conditions of employment will be honoured by tortoise, but also

any observer staff who don't wish to go and work for tortoise will be offered voluntary redundancy on enhanced terms.

And that was one of the things that was causing particular fury at the Observer because there was a voluntary redundancy round earlier this year, which quite a lot of high-profile people took and jumped ship, closed just before they discovered that, in fact, their management had been in negotiations to flog off their paper for some months before that.

Right.

I mean, that makes to me makes a lot of sense.

I think that's again, I think Tortoise have got a really brilliant deal out of this in terms of what they got from The Guardian, because you have to think if you're a nimble startup, you might not necessarily need absolutely everybody, particularly, you know, long-established and therefore quite well-paid writers and columnists.

And if they can, you know, if they can get, if they can, what they seem to actually want is the branding and the news kind of like the newsprint presence, right?

They don't necessarily want absolutely all of the staff, although they've agreed to take them on in principle.

So that bit looks slightly good.

And as you say, good for the staff that they can also exit on pretty decent, generous terms.

The people I'd be a bit worried about as well is the existing Tortoise staff, because it does seem that Tortoise, which has already sort of pivoted from being a slow news organisation, which was the idea behind the name Tortoise, to a kind of podcast producer, now seems to be flipping over completely to being uniquely the publisher of a weekly newspaper.

So all of those people who joined thinking it was going to be one of those things before are in a slightly odd position now.

Do we have any feel for how readers of The Observer might feel these changes?

We have a little, and we have that from the edition of The Guardian, which came out the day after the two days of strikes last week.

I mean, for those people who are still buying a paper, they may have felt rather shortchanged by two very thin editions of The Guardian last Wednesday and Thursday, which they managed to fill out the entire feature section with just a very, very difficult quiz from some school in the Isle of Man that they publish every year.

I never get any of those right.

No, it's impossible, isn't it?

Completely and utterly impossible.

But most other things were missing.

And almost every byline in there, brilliantly, was just said, Guardian staff, Guardian staff, Guardian staff, which I guess was just sort of Kath Viner and, oh, I was going to say, and her husband.

But even Adrian Giles did not turn up for work.

He was absent from the pages of The Guardian last Thursday.

So that was yet another delight that Guardian Reads was missing out on.

But on Saturday, there was a letters page, and that did have some fairly excoriating letters from readers saying, if you think it's such a great case case to be made for selling off the Observer, why don't you tell us what it is?

And certainly in that meeting last week, I mean, the accounts I hear from speaking to various Observer and Guardian people is they remain very, very unconvinced and extremely angry as well.

So it's not a happy Christmas coming up over at the Guardian and Observer.

So our third section today is about something called the Zev mandate.

And this is something that was actually in the latest issue of the Mag.

It's a piece by Hedgehog, who is one of our most secret correspondents.

Hedgehog writes all about matters of road transportation, and this piece was about the very confused and conflicting signals that are being sent on the matter of electric vehicles.

Not only the signals being sent to the British car industry, but also to customers.

And firstly, what is the ZEV mandate?

Earlier on, I said those words to Helen and Adam, and they both looked at me like I'd grown horns.

I think that's fair to say.

I thought it was a sanctioned oligarch, genuinely.

I just assumed it was another Bitcoin.

Well, so the ZEV mandate, zero-emission Vehicles Mandate, is

the mechanism by which the government is trying to get Britain to switch over from petrol and diesel to electric cars.

And they're trying to do it in relatively short order.

And there has been a lot of discussion in the press recently about

whether this is feasible, whether the time scale is reasonable, whether the mechanisms being used are reasonable.

Am I right in thinking that it was supposed to be by 2030 and it's been pushed back to 2035?

You'll be staggered to hear it's been completely sort of hashed around with at almost every every stage.

Right.

Theresa May, who let's not forget, introduced the idea of net zero by 2050 and brought it into law in one of her final acts in Parliament.

She said, right, let's do 2040.

And to be clear, that date is...

all new cars being sold will be electric right it's not to do with you won't be you'll be able to drive your petrol car you'll be able to drive a second hand and buy a second hand petrol car it's about new cars all being switched over sort of clean tap on dirty tap off by that point 2040 fine boris johnson then said i think think we can do it by 2030.

Have a crack, no, no.

You'll be staggered to hear that might not have been completely worked out.

But, you know, often an ambitious target will get to the moon by the end of this decade, that kind of thing, spurs action and innovation.

Fine.

Rishi Sunak then said, no, let's do 2035, actually.

It's all been going a bit fast and it's all looking a bit difficult.

So let's not do that.

Car manufacturers must be fuming.

They have.

I mean, literally.

That fuming is good.

For not for very very much longer.

They'll just be overheating.

They'll just be gently buzzing.

So they are, because

they have put a lot of effort and energy, although maybe not as much as a lot of people say they should, into this transition, you know, and they keep getting different signals.

Labour was elected saying we will bring it back to 2030, re-establishing Boris Johnson's initial very ambitious goal.

They have not yet confirmed in a legislative sense that's definitely what's going to happen.

But what they have said is we are keeping, and we're back to the sanctioned oligarch, the ZEV mandate.

And that is the ratchet mechanism by which you get more and more electric cars sold each year up to the point at which it's 100%.

So

this year, all car manufacturers have to sell 22% of cars, the cars they sell have to be electric.

Do car manufacturers not like this?

Because my impression was that actually building electric cars is good and people do, when they get them, like them.

I mean, people tend to be worried about the range of them.

People do tend to like them when they've got them and say, oh, I wouldn't go back to petrol, like sort of 97% or something.

Car manufacturers have had a nightmarish time, but it depends how quickly they've invested or haven't invested.

So the cars which have, like Tesla, very happy with the Zev mandate because they sell 100% electric cars.

Flagua, by contrast.

Yeah.

Having famously recently rebranded and with its commitment to all electric, hasn't, which is one of the reasons why it's had to pivot.

So exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Stellantis, which is a giant umbrella which has like Fiat, Peugeot, Vauxhall, loads of different brands under it, they have been really slow.

So they have been frantically lobbying to go slower and say, oh, we think this has mandates a bit much, bit soon.

But it completely depends how much they have or haven't done.

And how much manufacturing have they got based in Britain?

Presumably that all ties into the political well.

You know, if Ellesmere Port has to go all electrical, that's quite a big deal up in the

West.

So Stellantis have said we're going to close our Vauxhall plant in Luton, which was one of their two big plants in the UK.

And they've been trying to link it to the mandate.

They've been trying to say this is actually thanks to us being forced to go electric.

And what the problem is, is that it's not really.

Because globally, they've been having a nightmarish time.

They've just had an awful time.

They've had to recall like 400,000 petrol cars in America because the steering wheels are faulty.

Yeah, they were never, they weren't doing tremendously and haven't been for some years.

And the sort of shadow under all of this is Chinese cars, which are increasingly electric.

I think it's half of all new cars now in China are electric, which are quite cheap.

And they're pretty good.

And Western car manufacturers are really they they haven't responded fast enough and so they're now having to rely either on tariffs uh which are double-edged because it means that they can't sell their cars to china if the tariffs are raised on both sides or uh they're having to rely on very expensive cars that people buy but they buy in fewer numbers and the reason this is on the news at the moment is there's big lobbying going on seeing will the new government stick to the guns that it was sort of handed by the outgoing conservatives or will they water things down and louise haig the the Transport Secretary, was one of the two big voices in the room on that.

RIP.

RIP.

And the other is Jonathan Reynolds, who's the business secretary.

So the one thing that I keep on seeing said in certain corners of the web about electric cars is that one mustn't ever buy one because if one does, the battery is liable to explode and burst into flames at any given moment and you will be immolated as though you were driving a Tesla.

Is this true?

Mine has caught fire every single day.

I've had it so far, and it's been a flipping nightmare.

But this is what I think, to go back to it, is the involvement of Elon Musk in the Trump and being first buddy is fascinating.

Because I know I've said this before, but the Trump speech that I watched at the rally, he had to reverse out of saying that electric vehicles were bad when a neuron sparked somewhere at the back.

He went, of course, for people who want them, they're great.

So I think there is a really interesting counter pressure, which is obviously that, yeah, that Elon Musk is hanging around the US president

lobbying constantly for his electric car company.

So of all the bits of the energy transition that I think might very well happen on schedule, this one is, you know, this one's a goer.

Yeah.

But environmentally, Andy, what's the, I mean, what are there issues with, because it's lithium batteries, isn't it?

Where are you getting the lithium from?

Oh, there are a few different battery technologies, basically.

There's no way of making a car that doesn't involve extracting something from the ground.

The advantage of, I think, the electric thing is that you don't have to keep extracting several billion tons a year of oil to refine and turn into your petrols.

Once you've got the chemicals in your car's battery, you should be able to recycle those pretty efficiently.

Because at the moment, not many cars are being recycled, electric cars, because they last a very long time.

But once they start being recycled, the idea is that eventually your car at the moment, which you've got, you've run it for 10 years, you want to change it, you recycle it, the chemicals in there will make a slightly more efficient battery next time around.

The same quantity of chemicals, because battery technology will have improved.

So that's the big advantage, which is great.

And the other big advantage is you don't have to keep on buying petrol for it all the time.

In terms of where those chemicals come from, one of the interesting things about, to go back to the point about China and the increasing Chinese dominance of the electrical market, one of the reasons for that is that they have,

I wouldn't say a monopoly, but they have significant hands on the world's supply of the rare metals that are required to make these batteries as a result of the Belt and Road Initiative that basically saw them buy up large swathes of Africa in exchange for mining rights and things like that, which means that now the Chinese market is able to produce batteries at a scale that simply isn't possible to other manufacturing bases.

The geopolitics I think are going to be really fascinating, because we're talking in a week it has not been a good week for the kind of other block of power, right?

The kind Russia, Iran, Syrian axis, some of which is, you know, backed by China.

But it's really interesting that you have to you have to hive off China as being in a very different situation to all the other bits of the world economy that are opposed to essentially American interests, right?

Still, still like the Chinese economy's slowed down, but still in a pretty good place.

But other bits of that axis are not looking so fresh.

No, just think about the knock-on effects for our economy.

We're going to lose petrol stations.

The Wild Bean Cafe will be no more.

Where will you be able to buy

presents for your wife on Christmas Eve when the pub closes?

But you still get superchargers that are significantly better than charging your car from your mains at home, right?

And it'll be a long time before you can charge as efficiently at home as you can.

So that, yeah, the whole and this is the thing that actually the government really needs to get a grip on because chargers on a motorway are really expensive compared with charging at home.

They cost ten times as much in a lot of cases.

You can charge a a car at a h on a home supply, if you have a charger, for a fiver.

And if you get a car that goes 300 miles for a fiver, that's nice.

You know,

people are going to want that.

that

yeah but 30 or 40% of people in the UK don't have off-street access like I try and get the green ubers around the place and I always talk to the driver because I'm a nerd about this kind of stuff and they also yeah I charge on the expensive rapid chargers because they don't you know they live in flats or they live in places which don't have their own drives so they have to use this system which is very expensive you know so the the the government hasn't really announced what they're going to do on really liberalizing the charging infrastructure making it easy for anyone to just bang in charges anywhere It's such an interesting story because part of it is that kind of very muskite, like, you know, let the free market reign, break free, I'll be innovative.

But then it all has to be backed up by essentially infrastructure that only the government has got the ability to really invest in.

Yeah, it's going to be a hassle to do.

Can I just offer a solution?

Yeah, milk float.

You don't see them around anymore, so there must be a load of second-hand milk floats not going to matter.

Sinclair C5.

It's purely.

It's also good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Clive Sinclair and Benny Hill has the fastest moment in the West, I think, are the way forward here.

Well, that's what we've got to talk about on the oldest podcast in the world.

You call me your dad.

Just going with it.

Okay, that's it for this episode of Page 94.

Thank you so much for listening, and thank you to Helen, Adam, and Matt for being here in the room.

We hope you've enjoyed it.

If you have, and you'd like the magazine, go to private-iye.co.uk and buy a subscription.

We'll be back in a week's time.

And actually, none of us will be back

in a week's time.

But Ian and an all-star cast will be back in a week's time with the eyes annual Christmas show, which is live.

It's recorded in front of a delighted audience.

It's all the best bits of the gags from the year.

It's really great.

And that is going out in a week's time as a little bonus Christmas treat.

And then a little while after that, we will be doing our end of year Christmas quiz, hotly anticipated.

You won't believe what the scores have been like for this year.

It's striking.

So do tune in then.

That's all.

Thank you again for listening.

And as always, to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

When FIC leads to accidents outside the litter box, Hill's prescription diet CD multi-care stress cat food has nutrition to help reduce the recurrence of FIC signs by 89% so they can get back to feeling good.

Intended for veterinary professionals.

Every vet knows that cats love to get into

trouble.

But when your patients experience urinary issues, they need Hill's Prescription Diet CD Multicare Stress Cat Food.

With therapeutic nutrition formulated to reduce the recurrence of FIC signs by 89%, dissolve struvite stones in as little as seven days, help manage stress and improve improve social engagement, your patients can get back to feeling good and getting up to no good.

Intended for veterinary professionals.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.

With sofas starting at $699, Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in-feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washablefas.com to upgrade your living space today with no-risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.