The News Agents: Saudi Arabia: The Golf State?

Emily has insisted upon this topic today. She's come in in plus fours and she wants

to talk golf. Well, maybe not golf directly, but the influence of Saudi Arabia on golf.

Let us hear from the Commissioner of the PGA, so the head of the Professional Golf Association

a year or so ago, talking about how the Saudis wanted to upend and destroy golf.

I ask, how is this good for the game that we love? As it relates to the families of 9-11,

I have two families that are close to me that lost loved ones, and so my heart goes out to them.

And I would ask, you know, any player that has left or any player that would ever consider

leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?

So Jay Monaghan's heart went out to the families of 9-11 a year ago. It seems that it quickly came

home because just yesterday we had a pretty whiplash turnaround from Jay Monaghan. Once Saudi had

decided it would actually buy the whole PGA. It's a historical day for the PGA Tour and the

Game of Golf, and it's a historical day for the PIF and the DP World Tour. What we're talking about

today is coming together to unify the Game of Golf and to do so under one umbrella and to take it

to new heights. So now we're unifying the name of golf and the Game of Golf. We're bringing everyone

together. It's all one big happy family, except obviously for the families of those who lost

people during 9-11. And when he says it is going to be under one umbrella, it is going to be one

big sun umbrella because Saudi Arabia, after the controversial launch of Live54, the Saudi

Back project to lure all these golfers away, well, the guy who was in charge of that is now in charge

of this unified body. Saudi Arabia has taken over golf. So today we're going to talk about

Saudi money, hypocrisy, oil, and the Labour Party too. Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents. It's John. It's Emily. And later in the podcast, we're going to out of space. Well,

we're going to find objects in space. They used to be called UFOs, but we're now calling them

unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs, which I think if you're dyslexic is really difficult because

when you hear phenomena, I always think it must be an F, but there we are.

That took me so long to work out. I'm still now recovering from the spelling bee challenge.

Look, we're going to talk a bit about Saudi influence today, not just in golf, which is the

story of the day. Last week, it was Newcastle United and the football deal and the deal that was

secured by Boris Johnson. We'll also hear about Saudi influence on the government right now in

terms of the backing it's giving to space deals and to industry. But I want you to spare a thought

for Rory McElroy, who last year was offered around $100 million. Now, McElroy, a top golfer,

said no to that. He was, in essence, the poster boy for the PGA Tour, for the Game of Golf,

and for the ethics that came with this rejection of Saudi money. He didn't want to be

the Saudi Arabia ambassador. He wanted to be clean of all that, and he walked away.

Today, it turns out that that tournament, that association that he was so closely linked with,

the PGA, has sold him down the river and others because they've all decided, as you heard from

Jay Monaghan, that actually, Saudi cash is king. Look, these golfers who went to join the Saudi

Project, live 54, they were already hugely wealthy anyway. I mean, the Phil Mickelson's, the Brook

Kepker's, the Bryson De Chambos, they're loaded. Graham McDowell, who joined Northern Irish golfer,

he said, look, this is just upside for me. This is great for my family. They made no bones about

it. But you had Tiger Woods and you had Rory McElroy saying, we don't want anything to do with it.

And you had the PGA locked in a lot of legal action where they were trying to take down

the Saudis and punish any of the golfers that went off to play and live 54. And what you seem

to have had now is that money speaks louder than anything. Now, maybe that should not be

shock-breaking news. We kind of know it, but it does look like the most extraordinary surrender

where the Saudis have essentially won and everyone else has folded. And now this unified,

one big happy family of golf is run by the Saudis. And I can sort of see why athletes,

whether it's golfers or footballers, are thinking, there's no point me holding out

against this because it's a tsunami. It's going to happen anyway. Oh, I won't pay for Newcastle

United. And then you go and play for somebody else. And that gets bought by another sovereign

wealth fund. We know that Saudi is now pulling together four different teams in a sovereign

wealth fund of its own to try and start essentially a super league in Saudi Arabia,

which will presumably pull in a lot of top flight, UK, European footballers to Saudi anyway.

I suppose the question that I would say, apart from the massive, massive hypocrisy that comes from

one man pretending to care about 9-11 and overlooking, obviously, in the meantime,

everything that's happened with the Khashoggi murder and with human rights abuses,

I think it's just a question of whether we understand the shift that Saudi is going through now

and how central it is actually becoming globally to everything else. It has positioned itself

as a linchpin. It has hosted Zelensky to Jeddah, to the Arab League summit. It is being

courted assiduously with American officials flying in, including Jake Sullivan and Biden.

It is forging better ties in the neighborhood. It was Saudi, of course, that has brought

Bashar al-Assad from Syria back into the fold. It's resuming relations with Qatar. It's making up

to Iran. It's normalising its ties with Israel. And it is also working backing British companies,

British investment in space now. So there is a sense in which, if you do not understand the

tentacles of Saudi money, of just how deep and how wide they go, we are not in a position to

ever say no to them on anything. What has happened in the past is that, stay with football. I was

in Washington when Wayne Rooney, at the end of his career, signed for DC United. I went to see him

play in the first game. Beckham went to play in LA. Footballers at the end of their career have gone

where they can make maybe one last huge payday. But it's random. It's the clubs that might have

money. And whether it's in a Japanese league or a Chinese league or an American league,

they go to where the money is. What is different about this is that you feel that this is Saudi

sovereign wealth fund. This is an objective of foreign policy to get hold of these things,

to get hold of golf, to get hold of boxing. Where you read in the paper that there is this

bout taking place. You think, do I want to watch this? Oh, it's taking place in Riyadh,

who'd have thunk it? And that is why- Well, as we've been told today, it is unlikely that two

of the greatest boxers in the world now, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, would fight anywhere

other than Riyadh than Saudi Arabia, because that is where the money is. And I just think it's really

important that we are kind of cognizant that the money is now buying everything. It is deciding

everything. And it is moving it to Saudi. And it is deliberate. And it is about the projection

of soft power through sport, of real power through what you're going to invest in and what the price

of oil should be and what should happen at the next opening meeting. And whether people stand up to

you and whether people castigate you for murdering journalists. And so I suspect that you will hear a

lot less about human rights abuses and everything else, because the Saudis influence will be so great

that probably people won't want to talk about it. And, you know, even today, as we're having this

discussion now, I spoke to a former Tory minister who knows the sporting world extremely well.

And this person said to me, I'm not getting involved in this debate. It is too toxic

when it comes to Saudi Arabia. People are fearful to speak out about Saudi Arabia,

whether in government or out of government. Yeah, because it's where we were with China,

right? If you think about the embrace of China in the Cameron Osborne days, where we couldn't

do enough for China, quite frankly, now the tide has turned. People are very watchful of what money

is going to China. You know, we talk about the China Hawks now, Liz Truss being the embodiment

of one, at least. But if everyone's eyes are on China, you're not looking at Saudi.

And that's where all the new stuff is going on right now. So that is Saudi. And don't forget,

Saudi has built its fortunes amassed, its extraordinary fortunes on oil. And there is

a debate raging right now within the Labour Party itself about whether Labour should be backing

the exploration of new oil fields in the North Sea. And you'll find many on the Conservative

benches saying, what a terrible thing to say, that's the end. And you'll see Labour saying,

if we don't find access to new energy sources, to green energy, to climate friendly energy sources,

then it's not just about jobs here, but it's about who we're beholden to in the wider world.

And Lewis will be with us in just a moment. So Lewis, one of the things we have spoken about

on this podcast a lot about in relation to Labour is how unified the party is, how determined,

how everything is about success at the next election. That's all true. But on the energy

policies and whether Labour is going to promise a ban on new UK oil and gas licenses.

Yeah, and John, it's not even under the surface either or just under the surface. There's certainly

a lot of internal discussion going on, but it's out in the open. And this is maybe one of the

reasons why I mean, people always call it oppositions and Starmer to have more policy.

This is why they don't. This is why they don't, because it attracts, it opens a sort of Pandora's

box because as soon as you have a policy, particularly within the Labour movement,

which is a fractious collection of people institutions at the best of times,

then it very, very quickly degenerates. And we've seen that with this policy over the

course of the last week. So Starmer would Labour come out and say that there will be no new,

and this is important to bear in mind, it's not that there will be no further oil and gas extraction,

but there will be no new licenses given for further exploration. And within a week, you've

seen it not only be controversial outside the Labour Party, but even within the Labour Party.

And you've had the unions, including the GMB, and even Unite coming forward and condemning the

policy, because of course there are still, and the figures are disputed exactly how many, but

there are still a lot of jobs reliant on oil and gas. And the GMB who are leading the charge of this

literally have the boiler makers and boiler maintainers union as part of their members.

And given that 70% of the UK still currently uses gas boilers and will do for the foreseeable future,

they're completely against it. It does seem to me to be a communication problem as much as

anything, because Keir Starmer quotes Joe Biden, who said memorably before the Inflation Reduction

Act came in, when I hear climate change, I think jobs. And I think the task ahead for Keir Starmer

is to say, when we're talking about new energy, it's very easy to assume that it goes into a kind

of young versus old, remainder versus Brexit, new industries that don't really exist versus the

old industries that we can rely on. And of course, people are talking about mining and the end of

the sort of mining culture under Thatcher and how that decimated communities, you know, like mine

and Sheffield and all over Yorkshire and large parts of the UK. And I think for Starmer, just to

very, very clearly state or convince that when he's talking about the end of oil,

he's actually talking about the beginning of everything else, the beginning of green, the

beginning of nuclear, the beginning of the investment that is going to take these jobs into a new

level rather than shut people down into jobs that no longer exist. But the problem there is that

then people are going to say, well, you're not going to issue any new licenses, then are you?

Right, you're not going to allow the economy to grow under that way. And people will say, well,

hang on, if we're not going to allow the economy to grow, then we are jeopardising jobs

and we're jeopardising the future. And it's all very well having. It's hard to imagine Britain

having anything akin to the Inflation Reduction Act that they had in the United States.

Why is it though? Because it's so expensive. Yes. But that's what Starmer's talking about,

£28 billion a year for five years. That's a massive amount of investment. I mean,

you know, he's talking about debt, right? Sure. But you've then got the problem as well.

If you're committing to that, okay, well, where's the money coming from for that? And that leaves

Labour open to other charges? Well, yeah, I think we should get on to that because there are lots

of people again within the party and there is so much of the internal fishes in the party at the

moment are around energy policy and that £28 billion. And there are a lot of people arguing

privately that that £28 billion is a hostage to fortune because it is going to be funded

through borrowing and the fear within some Labour parties that that is the thing currently being

printed or mocked up on digital leaflets at CCHQ right now, £28 billion in unfunded borrowing

each year, every year. The counter side to that though, and that those who are in favour of it

saying is, well, Labour has got to have some kind of radical offer. Yeah. That this decarbonisation

is going to happen. Also. That it must happen. And then if it doesn't happen in an equitable

and just way, it could be profoundly damaging for the very people that Labour seek to protect.

Yeah, I don't know why you'd call that unfunded or why they would I know it wasn't you why they

would call it unfunded because surely the whole proposition is that you borrow to invest in something

that is radically going to change the shape of your country. And if Starmer makes that argument,

it doesn't really matter. It shouldn't matter where the debt ceiling is or where people think

that it starts becoming difficult. If you're saying this is the new industry, we know that

that's where the whole world's going to end up. We're already talking about Saudi Arabia having

all the power over us because of oil. So why don't you remove your you're making an intellectual

argument, not a political one, the intellectual argument that you're making is rigorous. The

political argument is that Labour are always vulnerable to the charge at election time that

there are unfunded promises of spending. And that you just look at you go back to 92 and the double

whammy of Chris Patton when he was chairman of the Conservative Party, you know, which was a very

effective campaign against Neil Kinogue when he was Labour leader. Labour have always felt

that they can't make these promises because the Conservatives aided by a lot of the press that

are sympathetic will come and just destroy them. So Starmer is under pressure. He funnily enough was

at the GMB conference in Scotland yesterday, and he outlined to them because he knew he was going

to get a pretty hostile reaction from at least some in the audience. What he was trying to say

was that this process of moving away from the fossil fuel economy under a Labour government

would not have the same hallmarks as what happened in the Thatcher period moving away from heavy

industry at that time. This is what he said. And I want to be absolutely clear. Oil and gas are

going to be part of the mix for decades to come into the 2050s. And I don't think that part of our

argument is heard loud enough and clearly enough for decades to come. Oil and gas will be part of

the mix. But at the heart of your question, Tam, is this crucial issue? What happens next?

What happens next? And what I will never let happen is a repeat of what happened in coal mining,

where an industry came to an end and nobody had planned for the future. And we're still living

with the consequences. We cannot allow that to happen. So I think if we just take the argument

about exploration just on its own merits, right, the arguments internally being made in the Labour

part of these, the North Sea supplies 60% of Britain's oil needs and 40% of gas right now,

some of the 180 of the 280 active oil and gas fields will run out dry by the end of this decade.

And without fresh investment over the course of the next few years, which would be the first

few years of a Labour government, then output will fall by 80%. And the argument basically is,

and what the GMB are saying and what some people within the Labour leadership are saying,

is that we're going to need oil and gas for a very long time in order to decarbonise.

It sounds a bit sort of counterintuitive, but you actually need to take out in a short term

more fossil fuels because that helps you build the technology and so on that you need to decarbonise.

And then if we don't take the oil and gas out, then we are simply going to end up importing more from

either Saudi Arabia or at some point Russia, which is more carbon intensive than just extracting

from the North Sea. On the other side, people around Ed Miliband, who is the person who is

leading the charge internally on this, say that two things, if Labour doesn't make a big offer on

this, then the risk is that how on earth are you going to persuade other countries to stop

extracting oil and gas just at the point where you're licensing more and that Labour needs to

send a signal to the market that this is where the British government's priorities lie. And if

you just keep doing the easy thing, you keep pulling the easy lever of more oil and gas,

then you're always just deferring that moment of crucial decision.

So how does the argument resolve itself? I mean, where do you where do you reckon it ends up?

Well, right now, I mean, currently the Labour Party is committed to and I suspect that, you know,

at some point there may be a fudge about kind of what exactly new licences, because I think,

I mean, this is an interesting fact, a third of domestically produced gas comes from fields

opened in the past five years. So even just to keep things going, you do actually have to open

new fields to maintain the status quo. But I think politically the hotter thing is the thing

that we've already discussed, which is the 28 billion. I think that's the thing that's going to

lead. That's the thing that's going to be important going into the next general election.

You've also seen the Tories, even in the last week or so, a light on this, because of course,

they think there is political hate to be made about, you know, what they're calling connections,

which don't really exist, between just stop oil and the Labour leadership when we had

a person in from just stop oil last week. Indigo Rumbolo described it as a victory,

the Labour position for civil action or civil disobedience. And Oliver Dowden, who was stepping

in for the Prime Minister, which he soon, I can PMQs today, also referenced it. Well,

I would say to the right of the lady, we're actually putting more resources in throughout this

year to tackle fraud and error. And we continue to make real progress with it. But again, it's

quite extraordinary from the party opposite. While we are working to drive down inflation

and energy bills, what's the right hon. Lady doing? Receiving £10,000 from just stop oil backers.

Adopting their policies, backing protesters, blocking new production and forcing us to

import more foreign oil and gas. Do you know what? For once, Mr Speaker, I find myself in agreement

with the GMB union. What did they say? It's naive, lacks intellectual rigor,

and could decimate communities just like Labour. So whilst Oliver Dowden is now agreeing with the

union, John Gummer, who is not, let's say, a very young left wing just stop oil activist,

but is in fact, Lord Dieben, who chairs the Secretary of the Committee on Climate Change,

in other words, he's a Conservative peer, has said he totally approves of Labour's commitment,

welcomes the policy, and says he's sorry it's not of you common to all parties.

So I'm not sure this will split entirely down party lines. I mean, it's, and I think it probably

goes to the sort of the new division that we're always talking about, which is open or closed,

right? When people talk about are you open to new technology? Are you open to new investment?

Are you open to more globalization? Whatever this means, are you open to something that looks like

the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been very cleverly positioned in the US as being both green,

i.e. sort of progressively green, but also protectionist, exactly. And if Keir Starmer gets

this right, he will make it feel to old Labour, like their safeguarding jobs, and to the young,

you know, extinction rebellion side of Labour, as if he gets climate change.

I think there was clearly an opportunity for Labour for it, and I think that's what they're

trying to seize. I can totally imagine, though, that if there is a Labour government with a

majority, and it moves down this direction, I can totally imagine that the politics of the

second half of this decade are characterized by big, big political disagreements and culture war

style disagreements around climate and climate intervention. I think that the Labour Party,

to some extent, is waking up to the fact that there's always been this assumption that moving

to decarbonize and the sort of new green economy and so on, would be inherently either status,

left wing, that it would help with equality. You know, people are waking up to the fact that

that might not be the case. I mean, Macron had just had a report commissioned on his desk,

and they put out on the Elise website in the last week, which is really, really interesting,

thinking about the scale of this transformation, and just like a few quotes from that. It says,

Climate transition is inherently a source of inequality. Even for middle-class households,

renovating homes and changing heating systems, or requiring an electric instead of a conventional

vehicle, both require investing about a year's income. Even if the investment is cost-effective,

its financing may not be accessible without public support. The public spending cost of the

transition is expected to exceed 30 billion euros a year. Considering new expenses and

temporary revenue reduction due to slower economic growth, the risk on a public debt

is approximately 10 percentage points. These are going to be the big structural factors

driving our politics over the next decade. And Keir Starmer's landed on almost exactly the

same figure of 28 billion, and in that sum, he's talking about exactly what you said,

insulating people's homes. So, it's not insulate your home if you can afford to,

it's the government is going to take care of this. We are going to take a break now.

We're going to be there, be discussing UFOs, but they're no longer called UFOs,

they're called UAPs. See you in a minute.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back. Now, if somebody starts a conversation with you about UFOs, you'll

probably start by thinking that they are a bit cranky, a bit secty, or a bit kind of,

you're fascinating, but I'm not sure I want to get into this too deeply.

But something has now happened to the whole debate surrounding objects,

unidentified objects, aerial objects, that we know nothing about. And the reason the

narrative is changing goes right to the heart of the US government. Because right now,

there is a former intelligence official called David Grush, and he has come forward to say that

the government has possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles. In other words,

he thinks that there has been a cover-up of things that people have known about right at the heart

of government, alien sightings that nobody has been able to speak about out loud.

And if you go back into history of the conspiracy theory, you always kind of start

at Rosswell in 1947, where a mystery object falls to the earth and no one quite knows what it is.

And then you get the conspiracy theories about Area 51 in the Nevada desert,

where there are US Air Forces conducting all these secret missions. And it's like this is

the color where the conspiracy theory was born. And yet what's happened in the past few years

is that government have been more open in the US about what they know and what they don't know

and prepared to disclose much more than they have previously. And now we have this guy,

as Emily was saying, who's come forward and said he hasn't seen them himself,

but he has been told very definitively that these things exist.

And he's able to talk about this because Congress is now saying,

we will give protection to whistleblowers. And it's fascinating when you go back to 2006,

the early 2000s, what you hear is pilots who saw things, who did not dare report them for fear of

being stripped of their licenses, being told that they were complete cranks. And so they've kept a

lot of this secret until now, because Congress is now saying, you can come forward, we will give

you protection, we're not going to lock you up. And there's a lot of people who are starting to

join the dots. One of those is Pippa Malgram. Now, she's an economist by trade. She's never

gone into the wares and wifes of UFOs before the past couple of years. She was a special

assistant to George Bush when he was the president. So she's been right in the heart of the White House.

Pippa, lovely to have you with us. What is going on?

Five years ago, Congress started holding private hearings on the subject. They turned into public

hearings last year. And in 2022, in the National Defense Act, they changed the legislation so that

whistleblowers within the military and government would be protected if they came forward and said,

actually, there is something to this. Because in the past, if you'd come forward, you would have

broken your what they call nondisclosure agreements. And you would have been thrown into a military

trial and into prison without the public ever hearing your name. So this has totally changed

the environment. And that's why we have a whole bunch of people stepping forward saying,

actually, something's going on on this subject. And there is one person in particular who kind

of seemed to have been at vaguely at the center of this kind of the congressional liaison person

for one of the agencies who said they have recovered a UFO or a UAP intact, and you don't

know about it. Is that right? He actually said the United States has recovered many of them,

just to be clear. So Congress is now saying, what have we been lied to? And now congressional

hearings are going to be held on this. But what really matters is that this fellow, David Grush,

is not only an Afghanistan combat hero, but one of the most senior intelligence officers the United

States has, also having worked for the Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And his counsel, his lawyer,

is the original Inspector General for the intelligence community. And the Pentagon gave

him permission to bring this case. So the Pentagon and David Gruscher aligned, trying to reveal who

is lying within the Pentagon about what they have. And what does he think he's seen, just to get to

the bottom of this? Yes. When we're talking about alien vehicles, we're not talking green lights and

daily boppers. What are we talking about? Well, so let's move back a little bit to 2006, which is

when US Navy pilots started to report that they were seeing these aerial objects almost, I quote,

daily, almost daily in their combat training missions. One of them is a guy called Ryan Graves,

who's not only an F-18 fighter pilot, but a top gun instructor. And he cleverly decided, you know,

if I report this, they're going to literally pull my license and say that I've lost my marbles,

which has been the case for decades. Instead, he said, I'm going to report this as a health and

safety issue for the pilots, which then the Pentagon can't ignore. And then they triangulated on

the phenomena with four different sets of sensors. One was what they call FLIR cameras, which are the

most sophisticated cameras the military has, infrared and radar, and highly respected pilots

eyeballs. So with all four sets of data, nobody could say anybody was imagining it anymore. And

so that led to what's now called the Tic Tac videos, which were released of what they saw.

And there was former very senior US government official in the White House called Chris Mellon,

who got it to the New York Times and published it in 2017.

And paper, we should explain, you have been right in the heart of government. You've been

the special assistant to a president to George Bush. I mean, do you remember when this stuff was

going on? Did it ever touch your dare I say radar? It never did. And I have to say, if you told me

three years ago that I would even be commenting or even following the subject, I would have bet my

bottom dollar that that was just crazy. But because I have served in the White House, because I have,

you know, my job is to watch what's happening with government policy, I have been totally

awestruck by the speed at which the United States government has totally reversed the

legislative and legal environment and has allowed all of this information to come forward.

This is all led by Senator Kristin Gillibrand, who is the junior senator from New York, a Democrat,

who is utterly fearless on this subject, which is just fascinating. But again,

they've had these five years of private hearings, and then they're going forward, not on a guess.

They're going forward on what they are very confident is real factual evidence. It just

hasn't been revealed yet. But this is a rollout that will take some time.

Pippa, why do you think the government has changed its mind? Because this has been

not a Democrat-Republican issue. The government has kind of kept this sort of secret national

security stuff under the tightest of wraps for decades after decades and tried to Scotch every

rumor that's ever come out. So why the change? So I think number one, militaries and intelligence

agencies used to have a monopoly on the data from high altitude in space. But now we have so many

private satellites and cameras that they don't have a monopoly on the data anymore,

including drones, which you know I've been a manufacturer of, which is partly how I began

to understand, wow, this is how it's happening. I think it's as well that the triangulation

on the phenomena in various ways has led people to be more confident. They're not just seeing it

with their eyes. So therefore, there's something real. And then to be honest, Senator Gillibrand

has been just extraordinary in taking this forward. And notice it is pretty much the only

subject on which there is total bipartisan support. I mean, isn't the truth that this stuff could be

up in the sky and still not that weird? I mean, it could just be space junk. It could be

meteorites. It could be stuff that is connected to parts of the universe that we just don't

understand. It doesn't have to be conspiracy crazy, right? Mr. Grush, who we're talking about, who is,

you know, coming forward with this, he's not saying himself that he's seen this. He's saying

that someone has told him that he's seen it. And so it's not a firsthand account.

Correct. What it is, is the first witness of what I think will be many. What I'm saying is

there are going to be a whole bunch of government officials now who come forward in exactly the

same way with the approval of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. To back him up.

To not just back him up, but what they're trying to do is shine a light on where are the programs

in government that have been held back from Congress. Is this a big problem for the U.S.,

in the sense that, you know, the U.S., dare I say, is not short of conspiracy theorists right now.

That is so true. If this becomes another example of like the deep state lie to us.

This is problematic, right? Well, this is exactly how I arrived at this issue. I wrote two books on

leadership. And both of them were about why do we keep having such extraordinary leadership

failures? And one of them is holding secrets and lying. That has been true for companies,

that has been true for countries. So this is one of those issues. I mean, he had J. Gahoova

at the head of the FBI for 50 years, right? Hello. He kept a lot of secrets. Talk about secrets.

Right. Well, you had Roswell in 1947, didn't you? Well, indeed. And maybe that is another

contributing factor to why now is transparency. We live in a world now with such extraordinary

transparency. This whole strategy breaks down. It doesn't work. It's in a way totally

obvious that it should become an issue today as transparency is bearing down on all aspects

of government. Let me point out one other thing, is that there's been no successful audit of the

Pentagon in the last five years. And they say because they can't audit it because there's so

many highly classified secret programs. So part of this is Congress saying, no, no, no,

we're telling you, you have to have that transparency. What are these secret programs?

Well, some of them may be on this issue. Well, I just want to know whether you think this has

a relevance now because of the way we're now talking about space and the moon and the colonization

of space. Right. So again, this is another angle that brought me into this subject because as an

economist, I'm watching the development of what I call the space space very closely. And I would

go so far to say that people have not understood. We are literally about to go back to the moon,

not to step on it, but to stay and to build, to use 3D printing, to build physical structures.

Already, monies are being allocated for power grids on the moon. And this is no longer science

fiction. Is it a total coincidence that as we do this literally once in a species move,

that suddenly this issue is needing to be addressed with some, what Congress calls urgency?

Why is that so? I'm not saying I know there's a link between the two, but I just find it

interesting that the timing is totally coincidental.

My final question, do you believe there's life out there?

So I recently met... I wanted just a yes or no. No, no, no. No, I recently met...

She's an economist. She's an economist. No, no, no. You know, I always do take a view.

I recently met with the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Didier Quellos, who discovered what

they call exoplanets. This is the idea that there are planets that are very similar to Earth.

And when he came up with this idea, people thought that was crazy. There could not be

another planet like Earth. Now we've proven, partly because of the James Webb telescope,

there are at least 5,000 that we can detect in the universe. So his whole focus is on,

is there life in the universe? And I think the right answer, and I was sitting with the

astronomer Royal last night in Cambridge, the answer is we have to ask this question.

And even if we find the answer is no, at least we'll know because we asked the question.

But... Or we have to redefine what life means, whether it needs water, whether it needs oxygen,

or whether things could be alive or living without following the kind of human pattern,

or the Earth pattern of life. Exactly, or what we already know. And I also think that what is

happening here is we're going to probably find that physics itself is going to start being

redefined with new elements, new boundaries, new discoveries that come from all of what we're

describing. But I'll finish just by saying, I find it incredible if it is true that this

story could have been suppressed for so long. And it's interesting that in the legislation,

it calls for all of the military and intelligence agencies to hand over not only what they have

on the subject, but who they have discredited over the years for suggesting that it was true.

So I suspect lawsuits will be... Apologies for what's coming.

Well, maybe not apologies, but lawsuits will start to happen around this. And I think that's

very interesting. And second, if I think from talking to a lot of people who are directly

involved in this, it does not feel like these people are making it up.

Pippa, fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I mean, it's almost like the X-Files has come to life. I mean, it's a shame Gillian Anderson

can't get any good parts now. Of course, Ms Anderson is playing one Emily Mateless in

the reconstruction of some interview or other that she did.

I can't think of anything to say to that.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back and space exploration, the moon landing on it, building on it.

So I heard of a university interview where a kid went in and was asked, I think you want to do

land economy, which is one of these kind of slightly complicated things, which is somewhere

between economics and geography, how would you quantify the price of property on the moon?

It's the kind of thing that... Very easily.

Zero, I think. Also, I think the moon property market will be very difficult to develop.

It would be very quickly inhabited by the Fox and Green Mini.

Yeah, well, half of it's in light and half of it's in darkness at all times.

So you can certainly see a sort of a split on the moon.

And you'd find these wonderful words.

Fox and the Sea of Tranquility.

Yes, what would they say? It's cozy and it's not overly exposed.

Quiet. Yeah, quiet.

Very quiet. Also, it's not very commutable, the moon. It's not ideal.

You're going back the wrong way. You'd have to find the words that Foxons would use to

sell you the property on the moon.

I went to a party on the moon. It was all right, but there was no atmosphere.

Have you got a...

Hi.

It's very good.

Right, that's all we've got time for, folks.

I told you, it's good.

Any moon... Any moon gags involving a politician in a urinal, John?

No, none at all.

There we are.

You've ever been at a urinal with...

Oh, no, I've done my one moon gag. I'm out of here.

Bye.

See you tomorrow.

Bye-bye.

First live show from the Sea of Tranquility next year with the Usagens.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.