121: Reasons To Be Keir-Ful

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

We are here to discuss the news not only of the last week since since the last edition of the magazine came out, but also the near future as well, because there's a lot of exciting stuff about to happen.

We're all back to school, back to term.

So we're starting with a big speech made by Keir Starmer last week, and I've just got a quiz for the room to kick us off.

Which of these was not something that Starmer said, all right, on the day?

We're in not just an economic black hole, but a societal black hole.

There will be short-term pain for the long-term good.

It's all going to be fine really soon.

Which of those was not a genuine quote?

Um, pretty sure it was the last one.

Yeah, it was the last one.

Yeah, yeah.

The whole tone of the speech was beatings will continue until the ran improves.

Yeah,

yeah, things I should point out: we're we're back at school because if we're not, we're going to be fine.

So, I'm very glad to see you all in attendance, but from McQueen, yeah, um, who I hope will be paying the penalty, he's been having a holiday outside of term time, and we should make him pay £200 for it.

Yeah, yes, at least.

Yes, things are worse than we ever imagined.

I've slipped into quoting again.

Sorry.

But this is the new dominant note of the government, certainly in the short term at least, is things are really awful.

We're going to be honest.

This is disgusting.

Look at this mess.

Look at it.

I'm enjoying it hugely.

A, I just, I'm doomerism, or doomers, as we all are now, baby doomers for those who are younger.

You're going to have to get used to this, and it's a great strategy because essentially the press in particular want to say things are terrible under Labour and Kirst Armour is saying yeah they are, they really are, but they won't be in the future.

I'm just happy that we can have a different note because we had quite a lot of boosterism.

I mean you remember Boris?

Probably, some of you.

You remembered what it was like someone telling you everything was fine.

You remember Liz Truss?

Do you remember someone telling you it will be fine very, very quickly?

Having someone tell you that it won't be fine for a bit is different.

It's new.

And you're, I think, a contrarian on the Doomer line of thought because everywhere I've seen the argument that this is a really counterproductive strategy.

But you think it might actually work a bit.

I'm not sure that

it's taken into account.

The British love the idea that we're all going to hell in a hang cart.

And online, everyone says, you know, it's all finished, the world's over.

And Sakir's twist is, we're going to hell in a hang cart, but we're going to turn the corner and we're going to come back again.

And

I think this will appeal.

So I refuse to be downbeat, which is

very contrary.

But I do think it's grinding that he's decided he'll be, you know, Private Fraser from Dad's Army.

We're doomed, we're doomed,

but we're doomed for a bit.

And there will be a Scrooge-like feel, a Dickensian feel to him.

So he's not just boring Keir.

He's full-on,

doomy Keir.

It's quite continuity Sunag in a way.

And that was a bit of a message, wasn't it?

We've had a lot of tough times, but we're turning the corner now.

That was the Sunag message.

Whereas this is more.

That was tricky, though, because the tough times were previous Tory Prime Ministers.

Let's turn the page from my predecessors in my party.

I was Chancellor,

which is a bit of a bad look.

And Rachel Reeves, you know, they mirror very well the full-on gloom.

And I do think

it's

part of a strategy.

But it is a way of saying

everyone knows that when you promise too many things and then you don't deliver any of them, Q previous government, people start hating you.

Well, hate us now.

And I think

this is very innovative.

I loved the fact that it was in the rose garden.

And for those of our readers who are of a certain age, you know, I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.

Right.

Along with the sunshine, Andy, there comes a little rain sometime.

And I think that particular song is perhaps more thematic than any other labour anthem.

Oh dear, right.

The roses have been deadheaded.

Yeah, I know, you should have had a sort of decaying Halloween backdrop, shouldn't you?

Gothic, like wilted tulips or something.

The counterpoint to that is, so Evan, I think, will obviously mention Keynes' idea of animal animal spirits, right?

The idea that markets want to hear this kind of story of integration and growth.

I think you're right, Ian.

I think the thing they're worried about is everybody coming to them with their hand outstretched.

And they already feel they've got quite a big public sector pay deals to settle.

I'm really interested to know how they feel about the deal that they did with ASLEF, who are the train drivers' union, because Louise Hay, the transport secretary, gave them the pay claim that they wanted.

And it was all of a day they were happy about that.

And then they announced they would still be going on strike over working conditions.

There's another pay increase coming along down the lot.

Three, yeah.

That's buses, hang on, yeah.

But I think, I just wonder if they felt that made them look like Muppets.

I wonder if they feel that too.

But then you've got they've got some big, they've got the infected blood scandal bill coming, for example, which is pretty large.

And they have got the junior doctor settlement.

Then they, you know, all of these things are coming.

Our cover last week was about the taking away the winter fuel allowance from wealthier pensioners.

So

they're going to have to make this case of it being miserable in order to tell people why they're either taking some money away from them or they can't have any more money.

They've really got to land that argument of restraint.

There was a bit of a debate about whether in the closing days of August a winter fuel payments cover was the most topical, but it was a really big story at the time.

It was a lovely picture of a penguin.

My theory is always you can't go wrong with putting an animal on the cover.

Look, I was on holiday in Greece and it was very warm there.

There's a solution.

Yeah, just

global warming.

Move the elderly to Greece.

I like the idea that this Starmus Doomerism is somehow an appeal or an attempt to appeal to younger voters who are famously not wholly enthused by the proposition that Labour will putting forward for them.

Because basically, this is a generation that lies in bed, it bed rots, it doom scrolls.

What is more on brand than saying, no,

you're entirely right, guys.

Everything is screwed.

Stay in bed.

Yep.

Do you remember how we heard about Liam Burns' I'm Sorry There's No Money Left note for 14 long years?

And I thought they're passing what Labour have proposed what they are unofficially calling the Liz Trust Bill, which is the idea that the Office of Budget Responsibility will have to vet all fiscal statements like 10 weeks beforehand, which is essentially to say Liz Truss's mini-budget ruined the country, which is a very appealing message to them.

I thought we're still going to be hearing about Liz Truss in 14 long years' time.

Well, I do hope so.

And I do hope.

You just look misery.

I do hope we'll be hearing more from her.

Because, you know, in terms of comedy, it's very, very important that that keeps going.

But again, the other thing about the doomerism is it's just there is a narrative that everybody now says on social media and papers say, oh, look, this argument that the national budget is somehow like a household budget and you can actually run out of money.

I mean, how naive and pathetic is that?

And I'm thinking to myself, well, look, countries do sometimes run out of money.

We don't have to go back to Weimar, but there are quite a lot of countries in Latin America who did run out of money.

And the idea that it's a cynical ploy by Keir.

I mean, why would anyone pretend pretend to be George Osborne?

The idea that saying, look, he's just cosplaying George Osborne.

No one wants to be George Osborne.

Not even Osborne wants to be George Osborne.

Robert Jenrick is now doing a George Osborne turnaround.

He's

looking very...

Svelte.

Svelte is a lovely way of putting it, yeah.

But he has taken a Zempek, hasn't he?

Kandy accuses me of being obsessed with who it has and hasn't in politics taken a Zempek.

It's my private running total.

But Robert Jenrick was one of the few who's admitted it, certainly.

I'd like to imagine that's why I was looking actually at the Tory leadership candidates' political ad spend over the course of the past month because that's how I like to have fun in the mornings.

And it turns out that none of them really spent anything apart from Generic, who's chucked 12 grand adverts over the course of the past month promoting his leadership bit.

He's the only person to have spent significantly.

And I like to think that that's because he's just so proud of his new slimmed-down physique that he wants to show as many people as possible.

Well, he can afford the vertical ads on websites and fit all of himself into it, so it's very handy.

Is this more less is more from the Tories?

You're going to have to tighten your belt.

So

there is a thing about

sort of personal optimism, which I wonder if Labour have taken into account.

I'm just interested in this, because there's something about the fact that people tend to be optimistic about their own personal lives, if they're polled about it, and...

pessimistic about the national mood.

People tend to think their personal finances are going to improve in the next year, but they they say, oh, yeah, the country's going to the dogs and it's in a bad state.

And this happens even with

if you're asked about your relationship or your health or whatever it is, you think, oh, yeah, I'm probably going to stay married or whatever it is, or I'm not going to get ill.

Yeah, people asked about their own lives, basically all sorts of aspects, think, yeah, I think it'll be all right.

It happens a lot with crime.

People say, hey, do you think the country is riddled with crime?

And they go, yes, I hear it's terrible out there.

People, you know, constantly.

And they say, oh, what about you about your neighbour?

And they go, oh, actually, my neighbor's quite nice.

Yeah, it just seems to be people mowing their lawn.

And yeah, it's a sort of negativity bias.

Yeah.

In terms of the doomerism, I think part of this is, we've talked about not wanting to be Osborne, but it's part of it is not wanting to be Blair.

I'm sure Sakir would love to get away from Blair, but you know, he's on the television most of the time or in the paper telling you what to do.

But

I couldn't help thinking, because I'm slightly older than some of you,

the rose-coloured spectacles, I mean, not paid for by wage,

that are being applied to 97 are extraordinary.

The idea, I mean, Keir's not, he's not nearly as exciting as Blair and Blair had this long honeymoon.

Well, he didn't really.

He had the Bernie Eccleston scandal with the cigarettes straight away

and had to tell people I'm a pretty straight kind of guy.

I mean Keir's cronyism row is pretty much bang on time

for the first 97 lookalike.

So I am

I am concerned that people are

nostalgic and you think, oh,

wasn't 97 great and the music and brick pop and the sheer excitement of Gordon Brown being Chancellor.

Really?

I mean, I think things were better when I was young, generally, but I think that may be a.

And it turns out from the massive interest in Oasis tickets, everyone in my generation also agrees with this, as they spend £300 to watch a man who can't sing sit next to a man who hates him.

There we go.

But basically, it sounds like, Ian, you are very pro-Doom, and it sounds like you're going to get lots more of it, so good news for you.

I'm pro-Doom because because I've had enough of Bertie boosterism to last me forever.

I'm interested where being pro-doom turns into Puritanism.

And I think the anti-cigarette thing is quite interesting.

And telling people they're going to have a tough time is slightly different from telling people they're not going to enjoy anything ever again.

And that might be a bit of a gift.

So I do think it'll be interesting to watch that.

And the idea that,

you know, Angela Reyna goes dancing once, half the Tory press has a fit, is that appropriate behaviour?

I mean, Nadine Doris, Nadine Doris, of all people who failed to criticise Boris Johnson during the whole of Partygate, now says it's not appropriate for Angela Reiner to dance during what?

The summer holiday before the budget.

I mean, this is Buritanism on a massive scale.

Tom Watson did a great tweet about that, which was, you ate an ostrich anus during the parliamentary term, which is a fairly unanswerable charge, I would say.

Anybody who's been paying attention to politics for the past 14, 15 years would have seen a selection of horrendous videos of Tories dancing at their party conference to a selection of terrible, like, I'm sorry, equal opportunities for terrible political dancing.

The only people who defended her was Michael Gove, who said, I strongly believe in community safeties being allowed to terribly dance in public.

What about Pretty Patel and Nigel Farage?

There we go.

You see, you see, you're all Puritans at heart.

I think this podcast is pro-dancing.

I think we can say that.

Okay, good.

But the weird thing is that the Tories will now, as you say, criticise that idea of smoking ban in pub gardens, having not three months ago had a policy that was under 18 should never be allowed to smoke ever in their lives anywhere at any point.

So it's really interesting to watch them try and balance those libertarian instincts.

I mean, it depends on whether we get your fave, your Caesar head fave, Rob Jenrick, as Tory leader, I guess.

And will he be telling us all to take a Zempic?

Will he be putting that on the health service?

I read a report saying a Zempic enhances your mental capacities.

Well, it's time then.

I mean, just on the Azempic point, if you ever want a cast iron bit of proof about the power of well-funded public relations by the pharmaceutical industry, the past six months of headlines about Azempic are an excellent, excellent example of that.

I will have more on this piece in the magazine.

Thank you, Matt.

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So we now turn to what Helen did on her summer holidays, which was go to the Democratic National Convention.

Because Helen, you've been writing a bit about American politics, and there's been a development since the end of the DNC, which is from the other side of the aisle Donald Trump's great big podcast tour of the USA.

Yeah, he's having a lovely time.

Actually it's funny we talked about Duma historism here because the big theme of the Democratic Convention was joy.

You had Oprah saying only Kamala can bring joy, everything will be joy.

But at the same time the kind of counter-programming to the Democratic Convention was that Trump went on the podcast of a Louisiana former stand-up comedian called Theo Vaughan, whose name actually stands for Theo Vaughan something quite long because his family are Polish aristocracy in way back in the midst of time.

And in which they discussed in the most interested that I've ever seen Trump being another person, Theo Vaughan's previous alcohol and cocaine addiction, in which Trump was like, what is it?

What's it like cocaine?

Is it better?

Is it better up than alcohol?

Because he is completely teetotal.

His older brother was an alcoholic.

And his dad was obviously, who's a mean, authoritarian, controlling type of person, was always very awful to Trump's older brother, which I think tells you a bit maybe about where his psychology was formed.

But he had a genuinely very interesting question about, you know, just about what cocaine's like.

And this guy said, it'll have you like a damn owl, homie.

You'll be out in your own front porch, you'll be your own street light.

And Trump went, Yeah,

I hear it's good.

And then Theovon started complaining that the coke you could get these days wasn't very good and he didn't know where they were getting them from.

And Trump had this sort of look on his face like he might appoint some sort of federal commission to look into this.

Terrible.

So everything's getting so much worse these days.

But this is part of a much broader

tour of young male podcasters and podcasts that appeal to young men.

So he had, for example, Logan Paul, who is a former YouTuber turned professional fighter, come to Mar-a-Lago.

When you describe him as a professional fighter, you mean someone who actually physically fights, as opposed to the Kemmi Beta Dock model of professional fighter, of this.

Okay.

I mean, there's a very funny thing.

If you ever look at any of these people, the best thing to do is look at their Wikipedia entries and look at the controversy section because there's always the maddest stuff you've ever ever seen.

Logan Paul's one says Japanese suicide forest controversy.

That's all I'm going to say about that.

Trump, as small boy, wants to know what's it like taking Coke?

Is it great?

What's it like hitting people?

Is that good?

Or I'd like to hit people.

I'd like to take Coke.

Are we saying he is, in fact, a 13-year-old trying to appeal to slightly older boys who've got the vote?

There's an interesting question about the demographics of these things.

So Theo Vaughan's podcast has, I think, it's 3 million subscribers thereabouts.

Logan Paul's has significantly more, if I'm not mistaken.

However, if you dig into the numbers, it does seem significantly likely that a large proportion of those listeners are going to be 13-year-old boys.

And one does wonder exactly what electoral impact this is going to have at the ballot box coming the 4th of November, because, yeah,

it is also a way of looking at it: a kind of whole new alternative ecosystem has been melded together of a couple of different things in commercial and sports.

So, lots of these people are linked by Dana White, who is the president, USC, ultimate fighting champion, which Trump goes to a lot, right?

Because he's the kind of guy who grew up with casinos and hotels and then all of this kind of fighting industry.

It's like you go and watch these, and they are now mega pay-per-view events because you know they sell millions of pounds.

So there's all of that.

Then there's the other weird thing, which is that every time they do these interviews, there's always an energy drink on the table or behind them.

They've all got their own energy drinks.

So it is also.

They've got their own.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Prime is the one that Logan Paul has got.

The eye energy drink.

Energy

is incredibly effective and and it's available well quite soon.

Absolutely Herbert Gussett swears by it.

It keeps him feeling just 94 years old.

Definitely doesn't contain cocaine.

Yeah, but they do.

You know, the Daily Wire,

which is the kind of big ultra-conservative culture war site in the US, has its own range of vitamins that are called, I think, responsible man.

And it says, because you need to be, you know, because you need to be fighting ready for the cultural battles we face, right?

We now have anti-woke vitamins

where we now are.

But cultural battles, they're not muscle pills.

They're kind of because you have to be fighting for it to make arguments on the internet.

I see.

I see.

Do you see what I mean?

All of this kind of stuff that a particular tendency of kind of men.

It's not going to storm itself.

Right.

You need fit bodies there.

Yeah, but there's something interesting about the strategy as well to pick up on what Helen was saying.

So

if you look at the amount of money that's currently being spent on digital advertising in the US elections, right?

Over the past month, the Harris campaign, since basically she was, or since Biden's resignation, at which point it became obvious that she was the de facto pick,

the Harris campaign has outspent the Trump campaign by a factor of about five, six.

There's a real disparity in terms, and this is across Meta and Google's platforms, and just in terms of the amount of eyeballs that you're going to reach, Trump is lagging significantly.

And this podcast stuff is like, it's free.

Like, you know, you don't pay to go on these things.

It's a great boost for them because you've got Donald Trump on, so they'll get a boost to their audience, which means ad revenues go up.

Trump gets access to an audience of 3 million, 5 million children, possibly, but nonetheless, he gets access to them.

And, you know, this is the way, this is the new way of disseminating political content.

I mean, you must have seen when you were at the DNC that they had, I think, was it 200 TikTokers, influencers, and things like that doing broadcast directly to kids through TikTok all about what was going down at the convention rather than or as an adjunct to the press corps.

I mean, this is standard practice now.

What's also interesting about the Trump campaign is that his social media strategy is being driven, apparently, to all intents and purposes, by his son, son, Baron, who you may remember from being a very, very tall, sort of, how old must be, a 10-year-old.

And yeah, he's 18, 19.

And so he's in charge of Trump's social media strategy, being advised by his good friend, who's a 17-year-old influencer called Bo Loudon.

So basically, and if you read it...

I've never felt older.

I've never felt older than discussing these.

If you read these things, some of the transcripts of Trump going on these podcasts, he'll literally say things like, yeah, my son really likes you.

So I think a lot of the strategy is this, is basically Baron Trump going, so I like this.

Do you want to go on this?

And Trump going, yeah, okay, fine.

But that does remind me of there was a thing where Boris Johnson, remember that election campaign, where he just used to dress up, and someone said this as like what an eight-year-old boy thinks grown-up jobs are like.

Like, here I am, I'm a builder, I've been a hard hat, right?

Like, they were kind of all like little, but and that, but and I think this is a sort of slightly more coked out version of that, really.

But you're right, the Harris campaign has taken a completely different media approach.

It's paying for it all.

She only sat down for her first interview and it was a joint interview since becoming the nominee and that's it.

There's massive grump in the US Press Corps about the fact they are not submitting themselves to interviews.

Trump is similarly swerving big set-piece interviews because he can go on a like one of these Max Reid called them the dipshit podcast circuit which is kind of sums up the appeal of them and just have these weird vibey conversations like the Logan Paul they did talk a bit about Iran but they also end up just talking about like you know in the Theo von Bit they talked about why don't people have heart attacks out of excitement at sporting sporting events anymore.

When we were growing up that used to happen all the time.

So just weird, just weird flights of fancy.

Which is the Trump Trumpy model of conversation is this to that to this to that.

In terms of the audience who are watching these things, assuming that they're not all thirteen year old boys as Matt points out, assuming a good chunk of them at least do have the vote,

is it likely to work?

Well there's a huge split in gender terms in the US.

Traditionally there hasn't been that massive a gender split in in voting numbers, but in the US at the moment it is really big, particularly among young people young women are really in the tank for the democrats and young men are really in the tank for the republicans and that is also correlated with a load of other opinions like young men being more like to say that feminism has gone too far or that actually it's harder now to be a man than it is to be a woman you know there's and that feeds into the cold whatever you want to call it anti-woke discourse of people like elon musk which is you go to work in a company and it's all run by women in hr who tell you you can't say anything anymore you know um you know the sort of jordan peterson idea that it was better when men were in charge of stuff because they were aggressive and they had fights whereas whereas women are passive-aggressive and so they just plot and scheme and bicker among each other.

This is all a very m male sort of world that appeals to these, as you say, Matt, like quite a particular type of masculinity that is a very anxious young man's masculinity.

Is this the incel tour, really?

I'd say it's it's incel adjacent.

There was an excellent piece of writing by a guy called Ryan Broderick about this, who basically posited that the entire appeal of the Trump campaign over the past eight years years is pretty much being like going after people who really just don't like themselves very much and feel quite uncomfortable with who they are and appealing to those very specific vulnerabilities.

And this feels like a endpoint manifestation of that because a lot of these podcasts are being consumed by young men, men, who don't feel very comfortable about themselves.

They often don't feel their economic prospects are great.

They don't feel that their position in what they would very much consider the sexual marketplace is advantageous.

And they don't necessarily feel that they have a lot to hope for and go for.

And this is basically basically appealing to them and telling them, Well, it's not your fault, it's society.

And it's presented in very racial terms, but it's not just young white men either.

Like, Joe Rogan's audience, I think, is about a quarter of that of the young male demographic that listen to it is Hispanic or black.

And there is a sort of sense of like solidarity between the races in America.

For young men,

that is a big, you know, you have more in common than you do with women of the same race as you, which again is very different to how politics has traditionally worked in kind of voting blocks in America.

So, one of the interesting things about the targeting of this is that it's not just the demography in terms of age and gender split that is peculiar and skews quite young and very male, but it's also the fact that many of these podcasts are very international.

So Joe Rogan, for example, is a truly global proposition.

And whilst obviously it's an English language thing, it gets translated and clipped into lots and lots and lots of other languages worldwide.

So this is in many respects something that you might term as an act using advertising parlance as wasted inventory.

You're buying presence or gaining presence somewhere that can't actually materially impact the goal that you are trying to achieve.

And it must be tricky, I presume, that a lot of Theo Von viewers or listeners also watch Logan Paul and also watch Adan Ross and also watch Blah.

But that's, I guess, unavoidable.

I mean, there's an argument to suggest that, you know,

as we noticed during the election campaign over here, Keir Stahmer kept on saying his dad was a toolmaker, because unless you say something three million times, the average voter will not retain it, which means that...

Your kid, exactly.

He was a toolmaker.

So I've heard.

There is an interesting thing, though, which is it creates an intellectual climate and a kind of current.

So even in our politics, you will see the way that the Tory Party is struggling to not bend towards some of the opinions of these people, struggling not to bend towards the opinions of the American right, which are very minority opinions here.

And, you know, you see people wrestling with that on GB News when the latest kind of woke controversy is often an American one or a kind of

slightly more provincial British version of something that's become made as a big theme by Americans.

There is definitely, we do catch the kind of backdraft of a lot of this stuff.

But Trump

was the ultimate boosterist, essentially.

And he got into power by saying, I'm great, it'll be great, things will be great.

And I get the feeling he's now without an act

because he's got to say things are going to be terrible,

particularly under this new joyful and happy Democratic Party.

So

what can he do?

As far as I gather it, I mean, that group of people he's going through on the podcasts want to hear that everything's awful.

Well, yes and no.

So, one of the big blocks of Trump's support last time was people who are quite wealthy in America but don't have a college degree.

So, one of the ways that this was described as a kind of demographic was like boat people, like people who are wealthy enough to own a boat but they don't feel like they're part of a cultural elite.

Here, isn't it?

I don't feel Trump's going for the boat people landing in Kent.

People who would have a kind of you know miniature yacht that'd be called something like you know

Buxom Bell, right?

And they'd moor it in Florida and where they'd have their winters, But they would feel that the kind of snooty coastal elites looked down on them.

And there's a very telling moment in the Theo Vaughan podcast where he says, you know, under me, we had the greatest economy ever.

The economy was amazing.

And Theo Vaughn says, Yeah, my cousin bought a boat.

And it was that thing of

his tax cuts for the rich and upper middle did make a lot of people feel better.

The Covid stimulus stuff did make a lot of people feel economically better.

In the way that it did very briefly, here, right?

Suddenly, when everybody was going to the pub for free, people briefly felt things were quite good.

But the bill has kind of come due for all that stuff.

And I'd like to end by saying, If Donald Trump would like to come on this podcast and be interviewed by Dipshit, I am available at short notice.

I don't have an energy drink, but I will get one in time.

I'll have a few kinds of red bull in the background.

Now, I have another quiz question for you all.

Who here has an app called Telegram on their phone?

I do.

You're nicked, Helen, and you're nicked, Matt.

Matt.

That's the daily Telegram.

You've got an actual actual Telegram that lives every day.

Matt, can you tell us a little bit about not only Telegram itself, but also about its founder, Pavel Durov, who has recently been arrested in Paris?

Telegram is a slightly difficult app to describe.

It's part messaging app and it's part social media platform.

And effectively, the way it works is like all of these things.

You can share messages with people, either one-to-one or with multiple people in groups.

Or you can have groups of of up to 200,000 people, all of which can communicate with each other, which can be subdivided into different channels that can broadcast different types of things, and this can be written, video, images, etc.

Can I just say that's a nightmare?

I don't even like WhatsApp groups with more than about four people in there.

It's just too much.

Or you can have channels, which are effectively one-to-one potentially infinite broadcast streams that anybody can sign up to follow and gives you a platform to then say things to your followers.

The thing that's curious about Telegram as a platform is that it is the most maximally free speech of all of the platforms that exist.

Its founder, Pavel Durov, is Russian and he made a violent amount of money from setting up what was basically the Russian version of Facebook called VContact in the 2000s, which he then got out of in 2013, 2014, I think, partly because he was feeling intense pressure from the Russian state to hand over user data data and all the rest of it.

So this prompted him to create Telegram, which he always said would be maximally maximally free speech.

And what that means is that basically they commit to and say on their FAQs that they will never, ever, ever hand over any data or any information to law enforcement anywhere in the world, regardless.

So there are things that you can't do on Telegram, right?

You definitely can't post child sexual abuse material in public channels.

That is explicitly stated.

What is not explicitly stated is that you can't do that in private channels, which, as we can all understand, is a tacit admission that you definitely, definitely can.

Similarly,

Telegram has for a long time been the preferred messaging and broadcast and information dissemination platform of ISIS, of Hamas, of Islamic Jihad.

It's been linked to operations conducted by people like the Proud Boys in the US and various other far-right extreme organizations, but also plenty of far-left extreme organizations as well.

Without wishing to give anyone any ideas here, if anyone ever does want to buy drugs really quickly and easily, searching on Telegram is not a terrible first step.

Trump could give it a go.

Should Donald be interested in trying some of that exciting marching power?

I've been trying to get hold of some responsible man pills.

Anti-weight vitamins are only a click away.

But the persistent question, isn't it, about Telegram is to what extent it really is at arm's length from the Russian state.

As you say, Pavel Durov went into exile in Dubai.

He was recently arrested in France.

He's got a number of different passports, hasn't he?

He's got one from like St.

Kitts and Nevis.

He's got a French one, he's got a Russian one.

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, UAE, because Telegram is currently based in Dubai for legal reasons.

Although, interestingly, its server architecture is spread all around the world, which makes it incredibly easy.

Well, not incredibly easy, but it makes it very hard for specific domestic legal setups to prosecute them meaningfully because the data is so distributed that the jurisdiction for overseeing the use of that data is very, very fragmented and hard to effectively track.

But the reason he was arrested

is in France a couple of weeks ago.

There are a variety of charges, 12 in total.

The majority of them relate to what the French authorities refer to as complicity in criminal acts, which effectively means you know this stuff is happening, you know it's illegal, and yet you are not doing anything to stop it.

And presumably it's a national border thing, it's happening in France.

It's on Telegram, therefore they've arrested him.

There is one charge which pertains to running unlicensed encryption tools within France.

And it's this that is getting people's culture war backs up.

As you can imagine, the arrest of this man who runs what is in part an encrypted messaging service is not entirely encrypted.

You have to opt into the encryption, which is one of the other reasons why it's in a very interesting position.

Because not everything on it is encrypted, unlike WhatsApp, where literally no one, not even Meta, can see the contents of your messages.

Stuff on Telegram, if you don't automatically encrypt it, it's not encrypted, which means that anyone at Telegram can see your messages, which means that Telegram literally knows that people are using its platform to share messages containing child sexual abuse material or to sell guns or drugs or people.

However, upon Durov's arrest, all of the people that you can imagine getting very exercised about a perceived crackdown on freedom of speech and the ability to send encrypted messages got very upset about this.

Elon Musk,

as you can imagine, a variety of other charming people from across the right-wing political sphere.

The more interesting one, I would say, is Tucker Carlson, if you remember of lately of having travelled to Moscow to hear from Vladimir Putin about various incidents and grievances from many centuries of Russian history.

And this has always been one of the big question marks about Telegram.

As well as, as you say, Hamas and ISIS and others, it is the de facto communication system for the Russian army.

And it was very popular in Ukraine as well, to the extent that the Ukrainian authorities have said, please do not use Telegram.

We absolutely are very worried that this stuff is ending up being looked at by people and it is insecure.

And as Matt says,

it's sold as a secure encrypted app, and it's really not unless you're in a one-to-one channel, unless you've explicitly opted in.

But the interesting thing to me about the learning from this is that these social media platforms that started off as a fun way to stay in touch with your friends have essentially become giant national security problems.

Because not only is this huge amount of traffic going through them, this huge amount of illegal material, they're also very good ways of mapping who is talking to who.

So if you're a dissident, for example,

everybody that you're talking to will now be held on these platforms, which is why the Ukrainians are so worried about the way, about any potential connections between Pavel Durov and the Kremlin.

Which he denies, I should say.

He does deny, but I was reading something interesting in the Kiev Independent about the fact that he's travelled back to Russia approximately 60 times during his supposed exile.

Well, and he's never fallen out of a window once.

No.

So

I rest my case.

Possibly coincidentally, when he flew into France and was arrested, he flew in from Azerbaijan, where he'd just been for a few days.

coincidentally Vladimir Putin had also been in Azerbaijan

it's lovely this time of year

but they always say about Azerbaijan correlation of course not equal in causation but

it does remind me of something that the eye covers a great deal which is the the trickiness of pinning down international and offshore money except this is international and offshore information and country if as until all 193 countries agree to crack down on offshore money, then it's going to exist in an enormous way.

And this is exactly the same thing happening all over again.

And it's about which countries will and won't do something.

And as long as there are a few countries which won't, this can thrive there.

And if the if the Helen, you were saying something interesting about this enormous pile of compromat basically being in Dubai now.

Well and as Matt says all over the place.

But you're right, there is a form of digital nationalism that's emerging.

So China has from the start of this era said we're having our own social media networks, we're not letting other people's in.

We want to be entirely in charge of you know Baidu and WeChat and all the kind of stuff that's there and there are certain things you can't say on those things.

We're not going to pretend this is about free speech at all.

No, you use our controlled apps and we're in charge of them.

Which was why Donald Trump was very cautious about TikTok, which is its owner at the time, ByteDance, is a Chinese company, because it was saying, do we really want young Americans on a Chinese-owned platform that could be used as an influence operation by China if they say they wanted to?

And there's a version of Telegram called Signal that is based in the US.

And I think the US would be much happier if US citizens were on that.

They feel quite smug about the fact that so many of the big social networking companies are based in America, and therefore you can get Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress and quiz him about

what COVID stuff he's allowing on the platform and stuff like that.

But for any smaller country, it's a really difficult question to do.

Do you really want your citizens on these platforms that are in some external jurisdiction you have no access to at all?

The same arguments as with banking apply with information.

And as soon as anybody begins to take the mildest form of action, which we're all told is hopeless and couldn't possibly work, they all start screaming.

This man gets arrested and all the freedom warriors are saying this is the most worrying thing that's ever happened in the entire history of the world.

And you think, well,

maybe it is possible to take action against these people and maybe some of these actions work.

I think it's important to

make the very clear point that it is very hard to conceive of this rationally as a freedom of speech issue.

Nobody is saying that you shouldn't be allowed to have encrypted messaging.

That is not what the French government appears to be saying.

That is not indeed what they've taken issue with.

What they've taken issue with is the fact that you shouldn't, they posit, be able to run a platform that serves nearly a billion people, 900 million users Telegram globally, a billion people, and have 100 staff globally.

100 staff in total globally and literally not comply with police requests to remove child sexual abuse material or people trafficking people or guns or drugs.

I mean, that doesn't doesn't strike me as a freedom of speech issue.

The second point to note is that the reason it's become a cultural war shibboleth is because Signal, which Helen mentioned, which is the peer-encrypted app, which is frankly better encrypted and a better and more robust piece of software, happens to have as one of its board members a woman who is also on the board of American liberal news outlet NPR.

And as a result of this, a lot of

Signal is run by a bunch of woke hippies and therefore, you know, and you will see all the time now people talking about how amazing Elon Musk's ex is because now it's allowed back on all these people like Tommy Robinson who were banned before.

It's the only place that freedom of speech still exists on the internet.

His AI will allow you to do, you know, pictures of Mickey Mouse smoking crack.

Like, there's a big kind of we don't have to obey any rules and laws.

Whereas, as you say, Signal, it's Catherine Mayer, isn't it?

She once did something like she put her pronouns in her bio and this is evidence that she shouldn't be in charge of a network.

So, can I check?

Does Signal comply with requests from law enforcement agencies or anything like that?

I mean, not aggressively, in the sense none of these companies do.

Even Facebook, which is probably fairly well established, is quite hard to extract information out of.

To give you an example, in WhatsApp, in Signal, in almost all of these platforms, in fact, apart from Telegram, there is an easy option within the app to be able to report content that you see that is illegal, breaks the terms and conditions, et cetera.

Telegram doesn't provide you with that functionality.

Which I presume is why they can get away with having 100 staff.

Yeah, it's philosophically opposed to any kind of government intervention.

It's beyond libertarianism into the kind of amazing Wild West.

But there is a big current within the online right and within the tech sphere of that hyper-libertarianism that, you know, governments only exist to kind of get in the way of innovation.

And part of that is they also only get in the way of censoring the real ideas that people need to hear.

Ideas like globalization taking over everything

and individuals in countries no longer having any power to change their own lives.

Do their heads never blow up?

I mean, once you've been to the NATCON, which is the international gathering of nationalists, like you just have to accept that no, don't expect it to make any sense.

Victor Orban has traveled over to America to tell you how terrible it is for other countries to lecture you on how to run your country.

What?

Yeah, none of it makes sense.

But Matt, I keep reading in your column that platforms and channels and these organizations say it's absolutely impossible.

We don't have the number of staff to interfere.

We can't possibly moderate that stuff.

And then one of their advertisers complains, and within about 38 milliseconds, all content has been removed removed that offended the advertiser and the entire process seems to be incredibly possible.

I mean what is interesting about Telegram is that it has occasionally been really good at complying with takedown requests for copyrighted material.

So yeah it turns out it turns out that pirating a film terrible,

posting terribly offensive pictures, not terrible at all.

One of the reasons is that larger platforms can operate automated systems whereby copyrighted material gets uploaded somewhere by the copyright owner and their automated systems can basically find anything that matches that and take it down entirely, which is significantly easier to do for copyrighted material than it is for new, fresh content, which is one small justification, possibly, not wishing to protect.

So, if ISIS branded their material better,

it would be easier to take down.

Yeah, what they really need is a nice, identifiable logo or watermark in the top right-hand corner of all of their stuff, so we can just mix it immediately.

And that's very helpful, Matt.

Pavel Dirov has nearly enough children to fill one of his own Telegram groups.

He's got a hundred children, I think.

Helen, is this right?

You've got children.

He claims to be an avid sperm donator, yes.

I thoroughly

encourage you to check out his Instagram feed, which features lots of photos of him topless in the desert.

He doesn't drink caffeine, he doesn't eat meat.

You know, he's one of these people who lives a very ascetic lifestyle.

But part of that is the intense natalism that characterizes a lot of that kind of on-natalism.

Technically, well, so Elon Musk, for example, has 10 children, maybe more, but that we know of.

And there are kind of consistent reports that he is, you know, he's very keen on the idea that high IQ people should be overrepresented.

You know, a lot of this is a return of a soft form of eugenics, the idea that smart people aren't having enough kids.

And is it true that none of Musk's children actually talk to him?

He has a transgender daughter who's now called Vivian, and she's got a very interesting account on threads.

I think this is probably the thing that's most hurtful to him, which is the platform owned by Meta, nay, Facebook, which she uses just to talk about what a terrible father she thinks he is, how he never accepted her.

He said in his interview with Jordan Peterson that she had been captured by the woke mind virus and a social contagion.

But several of his other ch you know, he's got ex-adark sedarial and

the the ones, the newer children, there is a feud between his most recent ex-wife and the executive of his company who had two of his chil children.

As Matt says, there is a difference sometimes between these people wanting to father children and what might some might call parent children on an ongoing basis.

It does sound like Boris Johnson and Rupert Murdoch are both part of the tech elite, which I didn't suspect.

It turns out that the great men of our time have a surprising amount in common.

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

If you have enjoyed it, then why not buy the magazine, private-eye.co.uk, get a subscription.

It's a fantastic magazine.

That's all I need to say on the matter.

Thank you very much to Helen, to Ian, and to Matt, and to you for listening, and to Matt Hill from Rethink Audio, who has always produced it.

We'll be back again in two weeks with another one of these, and we'll see you next time.

Goodbye.

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