394. How We Trolled the Trolls: Putin, Trump, and Musk (with Anthony Scaramucci)

Has Elon Musk paid for fans to defend him on social media? What percentage of Twitter responses to Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, and Anthony Scaramucci are fake bots? How can information on Twitter trolls inform us on election interference? Alastair and Rory are joined by Anthony Scaramucci to delve into the murky world of Twitter algorithms and trolls. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Evan Green Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

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• 0:53Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:12Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:14Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 1:26Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 1:57Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. That's nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics.

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  Politics and the link is in the episode description.

• 2:13Speaker 02

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• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to a special bonus episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:57Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. I love the way he always says "I'm". He doesn't do the "with me". He's very much an "I'm" kind of guy. We like that. Now- Oh my god, you're implying egocentrism with that statement. Okay, which is like, look in the mirror, pal. Look in the mirror.

• 3:12Rory Stewart?

  Differentiation.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my god. Now, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this with our friend the Mooch? I'll tell you why. Several weeks ago, Rory mentioned just how many comments he was getting in reply to some of his social media posts and how many, especially if he was being critical of the US administration or indeed of Russia, would be quite aggressive, quite dismissive, and often quite nasty. He was contacted by someone at a firm called, is it Valant or Valon, who analyzed social media interaction, and who said they looked at the responses and concluded that lots of them were from trolls and bots and he shouldn't take it so personally. So before I get on to what we then decided to do, Rory, just tell us who these people are and what they do.

• 3:58Rory Stewart?

  Yep. So this is a man called Amil Khan, who was a Reuters foreign correspondent and governance specialist who worked in Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, where a lot of these methodologies were born. So he started work because actually Sudan and Syria have been real specialists, the different factions in these wars in using social media.

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  I would have seen it recently around the attacks in Latakia, where both sides were immediately on social media, producing an enormous number of fake videos either to amplify the number of casualties or suggest that thousands of Christians have been killed, which wasn't the case, or on the other side to try to downplay the atrocities which were associated with the government. So anyway, he studied all that,

• 4:42Rory Stewart?

  set up a company, an AI startup called Valeant. But he's now trying to develop a whole bigger plan to detect and respond to disinformation networks, which he thinks might actually be relevant to diplomatic missions abroad. It's oddly not awfully interesting to companies. I mean, it'd be interesting to maybe later in the program, talk to Anthony about why actually people are not, commercial companies are not very interested in investing in this, and maybe governments are more interested in this. But anyway, back to you, Alistair.

• 5:13Alastair Campbell?

  So what we decided to do was Rory, Anthony and I would all tweet around about the same time, a couple of weeks ago, on the same day, around the same time. We all would tweet something and then Rory's new friend, the analyst, was going to track all the responses over the next few days. Do you guys want to read out the tweets that you sent or do you want me to do it?

• 5:34Anthony Scaramucci?

  The tweet that I sent out was pretty obvious. Trump is unwell and his tariffs make no sense. Will the sycophants continue on course or start telling the truth? And so what's interesting about that tweet is Alistair helped me write it. And since he's such a much better comms guy, you know, Rory, he lasted in his comms position about 800 times longer than me. And so I literally plagiarized that from Alistair. But I think the words in there were designed to trigger things, right Rory? Or it was the tariffs are in there, Trump is unwell, sycophants. And this is something that those bots would catch on to and then fire in a nasty response.

• 6:13Rory Stewart?

  Very good. And then my Trump was.

• 6:17Rory Stewart?

  Your Trump or your tweets? My tweet, my tweet was milder. It's a sort of a more of a kind of Rory tone. The Trump-Musk Vance alliance isn't just chaos, it's sabotage, betraying NATO, abandoning Ukraine, hurting our economies, weakening our democracies, undermining alliances. This circus boasts about greatness and efficiency while they endanger peace, jobs and our way of life.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  It sounds like one of those little speeches that you do at the end of our live shows when you're called to action to take on the world. Also, I thought that was pretty nasty. It was good. Yeah, it was nasty. I thought it had teeth to it. Yeah. Okay, well, mine went as follows. History will not remember Elon Musk as a genius, but as a sycophantic, unhinged enabler of a failing, deeply corrupt autocracy. A con man who bought his way into the orbit of power, but proved that money cannot buy respect or competence. As for JD Vance, the buoy has only just begun. This was the day after he was booed at the Kennedy Centre. Now, just in terms of the response, the report from Valance says something a bit different on this, but I think it's because it was done at different times.

• 7:27Alastair Campbell?

  So mine had 1.6 million views, 18,000 likes, 3.1,000 retweets. And my account said 4.2,000 replies. Valance's report said 7,000. The Mooch, you were about 271,000 views, 11,000 likes, 1,700 retweets, 7,000 replies, according to Valant. And Rory, 386,000 views, 4.2,000 likes, 1,000 retweets, couple of thousand replies. And I think Rory is right, that the more you say, I think it was Mooch that made the point, the more that you say things that are likely to trigger people who are going to be against you, the greater the engagement that we're going to get.

• 8:12Alastair Campbell?

  Anthony and I got the highest proportion of engagement from bots. Uh with about fifteen to twenty percent, that's that's sort of, you know, professionally organised electronic responses. And we've got somewhere between forty and fifty percent of trolls. These are either real people or AI powered content machines. Do you know how they work this out, Roy? How do they actually analyse how what these numbers are?

• 8:36Rory Stewart?

  They've got an AI machine and they set up a series of variables and then they mark them against them. So let's say they've got eleven different indicators, which are generally associated with a bot or a troll. Uh and effectively this large language model uh learns by comparing these tweets to these indicators. And then it it tests and drives down to try to get to the the bottom of this. It's it's not a hundred percent, but it's increasingly accurate and it allows them to do an automated way. And they're perpetually iterating to make sure that their model is as accurate as possible. Just to remind people a little bit, a bot is is is a is a robot, right?

• 9:18Rory Stewart?

  It's a software programme uh which automates the task of attacking you and Anthony. So just to put that in context, I mean, the numbers there are pretty staggering. You you managed to get fifteen to twenty percent bots. That means that at least a thousand of the replies, as you read down, are written by a robot and probably two thousand of the replies are produced by a troll. And they could be either real people or they could be an AI powered content machine. And and the same same, Anthony, in roughly similar proportions to you. So if people are in this game, be very, very conscious that when you're looking at your four thousand replies,

• 10:03Rory Stewart?

  of those you can end up with about a thousand of them simply being generated by a robot. And almost half of them being generated by the trolls.

• 10:11Anthony Scaramucci?

  I have a question. How do they find you? Is it Rory is an influencer? Alistair is an influencer as a usually successful podcast? Or is it the word search using the word Trump and sycophant in the same thing? I mean, in other words, if an obscure person is writing something very nasty about Donald Trump, do the bots attack them? Or are they just searching for certain people?

• 10:37Rory Stewart?

  As I understand it, and I'm not an expert on this, there are basically four things going on. The first thing is to do with the velocity and visibility that your tweet achieves. This is called algorithmic amplification, which basically means if the way in which you craft it, you could have very few followers, but if your content really grabs people, there is a natural tendency of people to retweet it, like it. And the algorithm picks up on that and begins to reinforce that, right? The second thing that's happening is they, the bots are monitoring particular keywords and hashtags. So they'll be out there looking for Anthony using the word tariffs, or looking at you using the word Trump or Musk.

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  The third thing they have is they, they actually focus on particular accounts. So you and Anthony, you've got over a million followers each, will be on preset accounts. They're just monitoring you all the time. And the final thing they do is they, they have preset scripting, which is some of these bots will just respond to almost anybody that says something negative about Musk. They've already written a pro Musk tweet that will just hit back. And so X itself, or Facebook itself, or TikTok, or Instagram, or whichever platform you're using, is looking to find content that appears to be appealing.

• 12:03Rory Stewart?

  And then, and this is something that Valance pointed out, in the case of our tweets. They appear, although nobody's allowed at the moment by Elon Musk into the back end of the algorithm, used to be the case, they used to be much more open to social media researchers, understanding how this works. But it appears from the AI analysis that what's happening is they're taking your tweet, Anthony, or your tweet, Alistair, and deliberately rubbing it in the face of people who disagree with you. They're deliberately trying to provoke it. The way to get the most engagements, replies and retweets is to make sure, Alistair, that people who absolutely hate you are forced to read what you've written.

• 12:39Alastair Campbell?

  Both of those people in the world who hate me, yeah.

• 12:41Anthony Scaramucci?

  But there are two people on this podcast right now that don't hate you, Alistair, but there are other people that might. Okay, I just wanted you to, I just wanted you to know.

• 12:52Alastair Campbell?

  Anthony, how do you feel about the fact that, because the other thing that Valance analysis showed is that a lot of the trolls that we were getting were real people and they were QAnon people, or they were Russian sympathizers, and they went back and checked some of these accounts, genuine people who consistently promote pro-Russian lines and propaganda, and quite often make quite clever little video memes about things that we've said. So for example, every single time that I tweet, there are people who, and I don't know whether they're real or whether they're bots, or they're trolls, or whatever the difference is, but there are people who will tweet a photograph of David Kelly, the British government

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  scientist who took his own life and who's, I've often been blamed for his death. And likewise, every time I, as I do every day, post my tree of the day, there are people who will then add a rope to the tree and sometimes put my head inside it. So that happens every single tweet, but...

• 13:54Anthony Scaramucci?

  You seem to, you seem to like it a little bit, though, Alistair, right?

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't, I don't like the David Kelly stuff. Unlike Rory, I tend not to read the replies because I think you can get lost in them. But how do you feel about the fact that there's somebody in the Russian ecosystem that thinks it's worth going after you?

• 14:10Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, I'll say a couple of things. The first thing is that my first day in the White House is very memorable for me, but I was upstairs on the second floor of the West Wing in Kellyanne Conway's office, and I have two phones, I've always had two cell phones. She said, "Give me your phones." I said, "Okay, sure." And she went into the notifications section in Twitter, and she shut off my notifications. And she said, "Listen to me..." Don't ever, and I mean ever, look at these again. And if you look at these, they're gonna drive you wild, they're gonna drive you crazy. Do not look at them again. And she handed me back both my phones. And she probably helped my mental sanity because 11 days later,

• 14:54Anthony Scaramucci?

  I was blown out of the seat. Okay, and so it was absolutely disastrous, as you both know. Stop laughing, Al. So I'm gonna have our producers, I'm gonna have our producers lower down your microphone with your insidious laughter.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  I love the idea of you, you doing as you were told by Kellyanne Conway. I just can't get my head around that.

• 15:11Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, no, I did, I did, because I didn't want to, I didn't want to hear the nonsense. But of course, being a human being, now that I've been fired, guess what I did? I turned the notifications back on. And what Rory's saying is totally true. There was a rhythm to it. Okay, so when I started tweeting, the first thing used to be, your 15 minutes of fame are up. And you could see it come over in a very rhythmic cadence. It's now eight years later. I guess my 15 minutes ended, I don't know, eight years ago. But, but, but the point I'm making is that you could see the algorithms, you could see the attack. And then I'll just make another brief point. H R McMaster, in the middle of COVID, sent me a FedEx. And I opened it up,

• 15:55Anthony Scaramucci?

  and it was a book from Catherine Belton called Putin's People. Now Catherine, you guys probably know. And McMaster said to me, General McMaster said to me, please read this book, and then give me a call. And in the book is a very long dissertation about what Rory and his Rory's friend is talking about. Server farms, fake IDs, fake personalities, real people at keyboards clattering nonsense at people like us, trying to knock us off our game, or try to disfigure us, dehumanize us, ad hominem us, so that we lose our voice in the debate. And you either have to just

• 16:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  be up for that, guys, or not, right? I mean, at the end of the day, I'm up for it. I tell people, if I played in the NFL, I would get a concussion. This is part of it.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  It is amazing. And I think it's, you know, it's something we've talked about a little bit on the podcast, but it's worth bearing in mind because it is central now to the experience of being a politician. So in my case, statements on social media begin, as you say, Anthony, absolutely with who the hell are you? You're 15 minutes of fame, is that fair? Then there is, everything you say is wrong because you thought Kamala Harris would win and she didn't win. But then increasingly, it is, you're weak, you're stupid, you've got a low IQ. That was J D Vance's thing. You know, I've got an IQ of 110. That's then followed by a lot of people who are like, you wouldn't be able to beat

• 17:27Rory Stewart?

  J D Vance in a, in a press up competition. So it's a lot about physicality. So now, more recently, you know, I'm a supporter of Al Qaeda because we interviewed Ahmad al-Shara. We're part of the global elite. I'm bitter because, you know, Elon Musk did something to my family and I'm just doing this out of pure resentment to try to get back at him and I'm bankrupt and I can't pay my mortgage and everything I'm doing is a sort of desperate attempt to get attention.

• 17:56Anthony Scaramucci?

  I gotta ask you this question, Rory, because I know these sons of bitches. Why do you think you're being targeted by the J D Vances? I mean, J D Vance is tweeting at you. So why?

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Why is J D Vance tweeting me? Elon Musk as well. Donald J Trump Jr. I really don't know. I met a former governor of a southern state yesterday who had reached out to J D Vance after that Twitter exchange. This guy was a very kind of earnest evangelical Christian saying, J D, you know, what are you doing attacking Rory? You know, you should be friends. You should be Christians together. What's happened to all this stuff? And he was sort of generally thrown off balance. But Anthony, kind of tell us, what's going on here?

• 18:34Anthony Scaramucci?

  I think they, they target you because you are a rational conservative. They target you because you have a very strong influential following and you're a common sense person. The MAGA people are tied to populism and they're tied to an emotional impulsive policy directive. You're more More of a traditional conservatism. And so you've been targeted. Professor Neil Ferguson has been targeted. He's actually ironically was a Trump supporter going into the 2024 election, but they targeted him as well. And, and, and their thing is, who are the people that could

• 19:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  potentially sway people in our movement? You know, no offense to Alastair, but because he is a liberal in their minds, he doesn't have as much influence as you would have. You see what I mean? And they don't come after me, incidentally, because of what Trump did to me. You know, when Trump attacked my wife, Deirdre, on Twitter, his people reached out to me and said, hey, we're sorry about that. Don't come after us. We won't come after you. And so if you notice, the Trump people never attack me, right? Even though I viciously go after Trump, they don't come after me. And because they know, and I'll quote one of them, hey, man, I don't want to be in a fight with everybody Donald Trump is in. You and I were friends

• 19:59Anthony Scaramucci?

  for a long time. He should have never gone after your wife. I don't know why Trump needs to go after people's wives, but I'm not going to attack you. You keep the fight between you and Donald Trump, and I'll leave you alone.

• 20:12Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Anthony Alastair, quick break and then back for more.

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• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing, though, that came out of the Valant report is this thing about grifting, money-making scams. So across the three of us, somewhere between 5%, 10%, 15% of the accounts had tip jars activated. So these are people who are encouraging their followers to send them small contributions so that they can basically become full-time trolls. And a lot of those, Anthony, are in the crypto world. Now, is that just because the crypto world is full of grifters and scamsters and people who want to make a quick buck? I don't know any of you in the crypto world, so I wouldn't know what they're like, but...

• 21:26Anthony Scaramucci?

  The commander-in-chief of the US military is a grifter and a scammer. I mean, he launched the meme coin 24... I mean, so come on. We know the thing is loaded with a lot of grifters and scammers, which is ironically slowing down the adoption of the good stuff. And so, yeah, listen, anytime I tweet, that happens to me. The grifter and scammer comes in and says to follow this person or follow that person, and this person's Twitter address can make you rich and pay the $5 and we'll give you the advice on what to buy or sell. And so that's persistent. Musk promised people, by the way, when he

• 22:07Anthony Scaramucci?

  bought Twitter, now known as X, that he was ending all of that and he was going to have a de-scaling of bots and de-scaling of grifters. They've gone up exponentially. The free speech absolutist said he was doing this and never happened.

• 22:21Rory Stewart?

  Given where our shows are going, just to take it up from the level of Alistair and us deciding to troll the trolls and just have a look at what's going on in these interactions into the bigger story, because this is now central to politics. In Romania, Anthony, as you're aware, the guy that was running for president has been disallowed because 150,000 TikTok accounts appear to have been coordinated by the Russian government in order to push him into power. When I was running to be mayor of London, I had political campaign companies coming to me saying... We can work for you. You know, we've got connections to Mossad, one of them said, different intelligence agencies. We've run elections all through the Caucasus.

• 23:03Rory Stewart?

  We can create, and they gave me a number, you know, how much money I had to pay them for each fake account in order to be able to attack my opponents. And one of them gave an example. They said that they'd sent a sex toy to a prominent running politician. So his wife would see it and then film them when it was received. Others of them would say that they could AI generate music and get influencers and pop stars to endorse me. But the whole idea essentially was that if I gave them a million dollars, they could create a huge campaign. And of course, this was partly because people were so interested in the way that Donald Trump had done it, which would take me to prominence. Now, Alistair would say at this point, I have to remind people that I did not do this. I did not accept these offers and I did not work for these companies.

• 23:46Anthony Scaramucci?

  I'm sort of jealous. I never got a sex toy in the mail. I feel like I've been left out of things.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  But I just, I mean, it's, it's a very, I mean, this will become more and more relevant. And Valence, of course, looks in the ways that Sudan, you get the Egyptian government doing certain kinds of videos, certain kinds of approach. You get the UAE government doing another sort of thing. You get the Russians doing another sort of thing. And the way that this actually plays into civil war in many, many countries, so that people's accounts are exploding with us.

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  Tell you something that's really interesting, though, because we, we think obviously about Russia, because we know that Russia does this a lot. And they, you remember Brigosian? This was how he, because while as being Putin's chef, he became the guy who was running these big bot farms and troll farms and so forth. There's a team at Oxford University that has sort of tracked this over the last few years. I was reading one of the reports yesterday, that, that a lot of this started with the democracies. It's like, well, we had a bit of a chuckle on the podcast the other day, Anthony, when the, the response of the American government to the, the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul was we do not interfere in the politics of other countries. I think it's fair to say America has interfered in the politics of other countries for a long, long, long, long time.

• 24:56Alastair Campbell?

  And so, and the press do it, we do it. We, we've got teams that are involved in social media manipulation in different parts of the world. But China, according to this report, has two million people.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  The Russians is in the thousands, I think we're probably in the hundreds, maybe the thousands. Russia may be now the tens of thousands. Ukraine actually had quite a lot before the war started. But this report suggests that 2 million people in China are engaged in generally what you would call media and information campaigns. Now, do you think that is worth, from a geopolitical standpoint, do you think it is worth that level of investment to do this stuff?

• 25:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  I do. I think it's incredibly valuable. I think it's influenced the Brexit. I think the Yellow Jackets have been influenced in France as a result of this. I think it helped Donald Trump so much so, particularly in 2016, and the information from our intelligence community was irrefutable, just reminding everybody that McConnell and Ryan passed sanctions, additional sanctions, on the Russian government for meddling in the election. And by the way, Trump wanted to veto those bills, and then we had to point out to him, hey, if you veto that, he's going to call Schumer, he's going to get the necessary

• 26:20Anthony Scaramucci?

  votes to override your veto. So Trump reluctantly signed that sanctions bill, but I think it is incredibly influential. And I think that this is something the Russians have been trying to do forever, but now that we have this fragmented media, and we have this deployable ability to go into these different social media sites to target people, the GRU, KGB-like misinformation is actually working.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  There's an amazing example. Martin Guri, who's an ex-CIA analyst, has done these big books on social media, but the big example he focuses on is, of course, the Arab Spring, which is the first big Facebook revolution. And what happens there, where we suddenly see social media's power, is somebody sets themselves alight in this small town in Tunisia. And then we have revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, spreading across Syria, Lebanon, to some extent Bahrain, Yemen. But the bigger thing that we maybe don't take on board is that you can also draw a line from that to refugees spilling out of Syria. And Jordan eleven and being destabilised, Turkey changing its relationship with the European

• 27:27Rory Stewart?

  Union, million refugees coming into Europe, which then supports the far right in Europe because everybody's really worried about immigration. And so you're seeing social media producing these very unusual third and fourth order impacts. I mean, who would predict that somebody setting themselves alight in a small town in Tunisia in the end contributes to, in the Netherlands, the far right triumphing in the election, or in Austria, the far right triumphing election. And then finally, we talked a little bit about, so just bring you in for a second, the way in which actually Labour was quite savvy with its use of social media, its use particularly of TikTok during the campaign, how good they were at getting engagements, what they decided to focus on, how their social media spend worked, the way in which they made the Conservatives seem a bit leaden-footed.

• 28:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think so, but I think still within our politics, it is likely that if you are telling things in social media campaigns that are reaching a lot of people that are completely untrue, I think there is still the possibility of blowback. I think that what this last Oxford University report shows is actually the misinformation side of social media campaigning is now much more prevalent and much less likely to be rebutted, not least because so-called legacy media is less influential. This report basically says that they see this stuff now being produced on what they call an industrial scale. And of course, what it's doing is making it harder and harder for people to know who they can believe and what they can believe. And that's being, rather than politicians like Trump

• 28:58Alastair Campbell?

  and people like Musk challenging that, as you would think that both of them might want to, is actually they ventilate the misinformation. The idea that we talk about social media companies need to step up and do more, well, you know, we're going to whistle in the wind if we're looking to people like Elon Musk to improve the debate.

• 29:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  It's not profitable for them to do more, though. That's the problem. If there was an incentivised structure to get them to make it more accurate, they would.

• 29:23Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, yeah. I guess my final question to both of you, did, what valence centres, did it make you feel any more inclined to come off X altogether? Given that

• 29:38Alastair Campbell?

  It seems that most of the engagement is with not with real people and if it is with real people, they're people who are just trolls. Do you think there is still a point and a purpose to be on there and to be kind of, you know, fighting for the things that you believe in?

• 29:52Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yes, I think the short answer is even if half of the stuff is robots, I think it's important to have the voice out there. And I think it's also for me, it's important to have the record out there because I think we're going through a very tumultuous time, particularly here in US history. And I want to be on record about certain things so that I've got five children, Alistair, I want them to know, hey, at least I stood up for things that I thought were classically American and not the nonsense that's pervading the society right now. So the answer is yes.

• 30:26Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I find it a continual question, right? My friends keep saying, what on earth are you doing? So I tell myself that, you know, what I'm doing is I'm trying to defend a space and Twitter for, you know, reasonable discourse, persuasion, you know, the center right. And everyone's like, you're out of your mind, right? Nobody, not persuading these people, you're not changing anything, you're not defending anything important. But I, so I, I come back to basically the idea that you don't really want to be bullied out of it. I mean, screw them. I'm not going to prepare to let them just kind of shout at me, shut me down. And I think it's worth keeping making the argument. And oddly, as all of us discover, just occasionally we break through. I mean, in any week, you know, I'll send out something and it'll get, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand views. And then suddenly I'll say something and it'll get three and a half million views and

• 31:11Rory Stewart?

  it'll get thousands of responses. And you begin to think, well, maybe getting through.

• 31:16Alastair Campbell?

  You sent me one the other day where you basically you were, you were atting JD Vance and telling him to keep his nose out of Greenland. And he got a huge response, huge.

• 31:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, that's because I learned from you. Of course, as soon as I stopped doing these kind of lengthy pompous things, but just say, nobody wants you, you're not welcome, just stop. Immediately it's like, whoa, everybody loves it.

• 31:37Alastair Campbell?

  Very good. Well, keep on learning, Roy. I think I'm borderline minded to stay, but I do, I'm with Kellyanne Conway. I, other than doing this exercise in the last couple of weeks, I don't look at the replies. I just can't be bothered. And, and I also don't think you're going to learn anything that much. So just use it as a platform and see where it goes.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you.

• 32:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  So great, great discussion.

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 32:25Speaker 07

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 32:31Speaker 08

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 32:33Speaker 09

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. I have done nothing!

• 32:49Speaker 10

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 32:51Speaker 06

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 33:00Speaker 08

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 33:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

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