AI chaos from leaks to lies

0:00Alice Fraser: Hello, London! The Gargle is coming to London Live on the 26th of June. I will be there. Our co-hosts for The Gargle Live will be Tom Neenan and Alison Spittel. It's going to be a delightful evening with some surprises. Head over to thebuglepodcast.com slash live or check out the link in the description below. I will see you there. 26th of June, the Bill Murray.

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2:16Alice Fraser: to science, the future coming, the past, both recent and long ago, now both happening and already over. This is The Gargle. Yes, you're listening to The Gargle, the science and technology pullout section of the Bugles audio newspaper for a visual world. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and our guests for this episode. Some say by tide, some say by tribunal, some say he's simply walked out of the sea one day already holding a microphone and a mild grievance. He's looked directly into the void of the news cycle and made it blink first. It's James Colley. Hello, I was born with a grievance. A lot of grievances, actually.

2:52Alice Fraser: So many. So, I mean, I think all babies are born with quite a sense of grievance. This is a great way to enter, but my son entered the world and his first act was pissing on everyone around him. And I thought, yeah, that's one of mine. And raised by a library that got tired of being quiet, the hot bookish nerd that's hot to both nerds and books. Somewhere right now a thesaurus is checking its own pulse. Please welcome to the show the man, the myth, Tom Neenan. Thank you. This is actually very fitting. I started today by going into a library and pissing on everything I could see. We are in accord.

3:29Alice Fraser: And this week Sweden might become a rare earth element goldmine and by goldmine it means other than goldmine. Researchers are cataloguing everything in Swedish mineral deposits rather than mining for one target metal, which is just to say they're processing all the dirt and seeing if any of it's good. Positioning Sweden as a possible source of materials needed for magnets and green tech, because there's nothing greener than feeding an entire country's dirt into a wood chipper to see what happens. And researchers have engineered bacteria into a living plastic that fully breaks itself down once activating, aiming at the mountain of packaging waste so your Amazon boxes could break themselves down, maybe while they're around your new vibrator.

4:10Alice Fraser: And this one quantum, super weird quantum trick, supercharges energy transfer. Researchers have discovered a proton-assisted mechanism that dramatically improves how energy moves between quantum dots and nearby molecules with the proton briefly shifting position to help the handoff along. All of this exciting news, but first, let's get into our reviews. as you know each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars Tom Neenam what have you brought in for us? I am delighted this week to review what I am calling the Jimothy phenomenon I don't know if you're all familiar with Jimothy he is a Seattle based raccoon with a spinal deformity which means that he has an unusually round body and in a dark world in a world where things are going to hell in a handcart jimothy i think has brought light to uh to these dark times just by existing he's a little fellow who runs around having a wonderful time uh going through people's bins and being sort of adorably spherical um and i think that sometimes like collectively we all yearn for something simple something innocent, something beautiful, and something kind of comes along to fit what we need from that.

5:33And this time, I think it's Jimothy. He's beautiful. He's a hero for our times. And for me, I give him five stars.

5:42Alice Fraser: Five stars for Jimothy. I think it is great that everybody's come together on Jimothy and it feels unproblematic to enjoy a raccoon's deformity because mainly he seems to be fine. He seems to be just getting on with it. And it doesn't feel like we're punching down. Jimothy is doing better than most of us. I feel like I often come on the gargle and I am the bad guy, but I would like to cook and eat this creature. I think that should be okay. Do we not have space for all ideas here? I would like to give him a little bit of a soy, garlic, honey kind of marinade. I would like to slow cook him. I think just crispy right at the end, like put it up to 300 degrees, just get that skin really popping.

6:31I would like to eat this and not because I think he will taste good. I think he will taste terrible. I would like to ruin everyone else's nice time.

6:41Alice Fraser: I have been enjoying Jimmy Othi only on the periphery, partly because I resent being drawn into cool culture and I hate fun, but also because, you know, it's only going to be a week before we discover that Jimothy did blackface or something about immigrants or, you know, voted for someone we don't agree with. So I feel I'm going to enjoy people's enjoyment of Jimothy. I feel like we have the full spectrum of Jimothy approaches here. You're a slay Jimothy agnostic. You're like, I'm going to hang on to Jimothy until we've got the full picture of what's going on here. Being neutral about Jimothy is being complicit in Jimothy.

7:22I know. I need you to take a stand.

7:24Alice Fraser: I get accused of centrism all the time. Silence is violence on the Jimothy front. I'm happy that you're happy about Jimothy. Do I have to go on the Jimothy parade is all I'm saying. Just, I reckon though, like you could kick him so far. and he's like kind of perfectly positioned for like just really to get up and get some good lift on that thing i think that's what is this is so special about jimothy is that he but yeah he is the most vulnerable creature on the planet as he does look a lot like a football and also he's he's sort of one of the in terms of kind of valued species he's he's near the bottom he eats garbage he sort of makes do, yet the internet has embraced him.

8:12He is like a punch the monkey, but less sort of sappy. And I think that's what we need.

8:19Alice Fraser: Well, I think also the great thing is that normally for something to be that adorably disfigured, we have to have selectively bred it for generations for our pleasure. Yes, exactly. And then put it in a palace in Buckingham.

8:39maybe i'm just seeing him like the potential to be my monarch and that is why i can't help but

8:44Alice Fraser: respect jimothy tom neenam what have you brought in for us for reviewing that was tom's review i just hijacked it oh sorry and james what have you brought in for us to review uh i have brought in the time 2.55 a.m., which I have to say I was mainly unfamiliar with, but my 11-month-old son and I have been checking it out quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. He seems to really like it. He's got a kind of rooster system in which he screams and I get up. And together we sit and And I try and bore him back to sleep by watching chess highlight videos. But unfortunately, that to me is incredibly exciting and he might fall asleep.

9:38But I'm too hyped up on what Magnus Carlsen has done this week. And so it's very difficult for me to get back to sleep. So I've also been reviewing 3.05am, 3.15am, 3.30am and 3.45am. And I'll say diminishing returns. I'd say stick to 2.55am and then get out as soon as you can.

9:58Alice Fraser: Yes, my tactic was reading Jack Reacher novels on my Kindle because the great thing about a Jack Reacher novel is that at that time of the night, at 3 o 'clock in the morning, when you're breastfeeding your infant son, it's a very soft maternal space and you do need to rectify the gender balance in the room, firstly. I do believe you can pass the reading material through the milk. But secondly, you need a book that is of a very specific reading level. You need a book that is you're perfectly happy to pick it up. You're not going to pick anything else up by preference, but that also you're perfectly happy to put it down exactly eight and a half minutes later because you can't afford a book that's too good.

10:40Alice Fraser: You can't afford something that's unputdownable. You need to be like, I wonder what Jack Reacher's up to. Ah, punching. And then sleep with another flicker of an eyelid. We had a dear old friend of mine was recovering from brain surgery after a series of tumors. And he was told that, frankly, like when you're in this situation, you can't have stress of any kind. You can't have things that shock or surprise you. You can't even reply to work emails or things because all of this might trigger an event that you do not want. and so he spent a lot of his recovery reading every Matthew Riley book which I'm not sure how far he has translated but he's like kind of Australian Jack Reacher pulp style action airport dad novel and he walked into that comforted to know there will be no surprises he will understand exactly what's happening nothing will shock or excite or stimulate him in any way it is the perfect yeah that's exactly your first thought of what might happen in this situation because kind of set up, which is medically proven to be worthwhile for him.

11:46Alice Fraser: He is one of the nine great warriors of history, which include Mahatma Gandhi and the Buddha. He has one robot. Don't even begin. He has one robot hand. He lost his hand in a volcano puzzle-solving incident while saving a small child. He has a falcon called Horus, and he gets around in a Boeing 747 that he stole from Saddam Hussein. Yes. Guys, I'm too stimulated. I think this is the wrong. This sounds incredible. My brain is on fire right now. This sounds amazing. James Colley, we need to do. It's so good. The first three chapters are just explaining everyone's code names and the cars and guns that they have.

12:27This is the kind of book that when you turn to like, he's written a hundred of these things, but the kind of book that when you turn to like chapter two, it has the number two then it has a picture of like a map of afghanistan and then a tomahawk missile and you're like great sure whatever let's go that sounds too good i would need like a biography of a very dull politician where i know basically anything that they did during their lifetime i know every piece of legislation they failed to get through So I'm like, look, this sounds, the books you're describing do sound incredible. So I'm going to have to check these out.

13:07Alice Fraser: You would think that what he's managed to do incredibly is tell these wildly eventful plot lines that contain zero suspense. So, for example, there's all these like traps and puzzles and they're in like an ancient Egyptian tomb and there's like a terrible trap. But it is not solved by like all the audience going along with him on the journey of solving the puzzle or deducing the. It's solved by him remembering a page of a book he read once.

13:38Alice Fraser: Top news story this week is Musk says that Grok Imagine will make a historically accurate AI adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. Elon Musk, one of the most wealthy men in human history, has taken offense at Christopher Nolan's very successful adaptation of The Odyssey, an ancient Greek poem, and has decided that it isn't good enough and that he wants to replicate it in better ways with his own special anti-woke AI engine, Grok. James Colley, you're wearing an unnecessarily cool jacket. Can you unpack this story for us? Well, I am in a fun period of one show. I finished having ended and having a few weeks, so I have been going and watching The Odyssey as often as I can, just to check they haven't snuck any extra woke in there after the first few weeks.

14:37So Elon Musk has decided that he's going to use his AI, Give it a break from just making anime pictures and coming up with new slurs to go and create a better version of the film that's currently tracking to make about$1.3 billion. And it has like 97 % on Rotten Tomatoes. He will improve that film with his own terrible AI. Now, I have to say, I have watched some of the footage already generated of people trying to make this, and it is wonderfully shit. I would like to level that. They redid the scene of the blinding of Polymythus, the Cyclops in the cave, the famous like no one is killing me scene, which is that little pun is missing from the film.

15:29So they've recreated that scene, except unfortunately in Grok, the Cyclops has two eyes, which is the kind of the one thing that the Cyclops absolutely cannot have. Which means even in the blighting of the Cyclops, he's like, ah, well, I can still see you. It doesn't really affect me that bad. Now I technically am a Cyclops at least. I also love in this, the idea that anyone would buy that Elon has read the Odyssey. We know he hasn't. We all know he hasn't. There's simply no chance. But I think the issue is, and we all understand this, it's not so much woke or anything of that sort. It's that the Odyssey is liked and people enjoy seeing it, which are two things that Elon himself has never experienced.

16:21And therefore he has this raging jealousy. He's kind of like a Poseidon metaphor of the sort, all the power, but unable to try to punish the rest of us because he can't have what he wants.

16:34Alice Fraser: I have seen the Odyssey and I feel like it might even be less to do with the politics of general wokeness and more to do with the fact that it's like clearly an attack on men who are ruining the world and a suggestion that they ought to have ptsd about it i think that's sort of i mean without spoiler alert um uh it's sort of a psychological fable about how uh how jason born can't get home to his family because he feels bad about the bombing of troy um there's a moment in the odyssey where um obviously i don't think this is a spoiler because it's a very old story but Odysseus is sort of sent down to Hades and he is confronted by the spirits of everyone who has sort of died in his name.

17:24And it's this field that's absolutely full of these souls which torment him. In the same week that Elon Musk was interviewed about the cuts that he suggested and implemented to USAID and the potential fatalities that that caused, which may go into the hundreds of thousands. and I think he's a man who has the cognitive dissonance to sort of watch a scene like that and not see that it directly applies to him that it you know as much as I don't think Christopher Nolan is a didactic political filmmaker I think he is he's someone who definitely is going through something with regard to you know what he thinks about America's history and as much as he ever would he's basically uh you know reaching his hand out the screen grabbing Elon Musk by the scruff the neck and going this is you except that you don't have the self-awareness that Odysseus does and his reaction is to go ah yes okay I will remake this so that I feel none of the um the awkwardness I did when confronted by my own flaws.

18:27God I would love a film maybe made by Grok in which Elon Musk goes down to Hades and is confronted by every joke that died in his mouth.

18:39i mean you know i i would love that for him but then i'd also be terrified a similar fate would before me just forget again oh god i thought they'd get that reference to a particular obscure doctor who thing and uh it wasn't right for like you know uh uh the uh camden or the yeah the cardiff glee on a wednesday i don't know if london people have heard of matthew riley This is going to take about 20 minutes of time to really get into who he is.

19:09Alice Fraser: I've done bits on Matthew Riley before. Wow. Never quite got them to work as well as I wanted them to, but, you know. Well, neither did Matthew Riley. He's very successful. Very, very, very, very, very, very successful. This brings us to our next news story, which is that apparently your brain is rewriting reality in your sleep. This is very exciting news coming out of the IMT School for Advanced Studies. A large study of more than 3 ,700 dream and waking reports found that what we experience during sleep is shaped by our personalities and the world around us. but also that there are apparently people who are interested in hearing about your dreams.

19:58Alice Fraser: Get into this study, boring people. Get in. Tom and Neenan, you've slept before. Can you unfold this story for us a bit? Yes. Of course. I think my internet's being a bit weird, so apologies if I go glitchy. But maybe that's a glitch in reality and we can make it a thematic thing. yeah um so this is the idea that basically your dreams are like you are are we surprised by this i thought this is what we sort of thought which is that basically your dreams aren't random they are you sort of reforming your understanding of the world in the way that i think we always knew that like babies when babies were asleep and they were kicking and stuff that they were sort of trying to understand because everything for a baby is new and is fresh input that basically when they're sleeping, their brain is just frantically trying to organize everything that they've experienced into some kind of logic or something, because otherwise the world is an incredibly terrifying place.

20:59But basically, we are trying to process our version of the world through dreams, which is comforting, because I always assume that my dreams are just Leonardo DiCaprio's group of kind of heisty men trying to get me to give them my own inheritance for some enormous business acquisition I'm about to have. But luckily, no. So the research published in the Communication Psychology examined more than 3 ,700 descriptions of dreams from 287 people, which those are the real heroes, guys. The people I had to listen to, it was like my dad's office from when I was growing up, but somehow also like my own classroom from second grade and all that kind of stuff is just exhausting.

21:51And yeah, they had to listen to all this and basically see that this is how people are, yeah, how they're choosing to kind of reform reality in their own way. And I'm sort of surprised that it's taken this long to find that out. Am I mad in this?

22:08Alice Fraser: I think everyone sort of had a suspicion of this, but no one has really done the research about specifically the result being that dream content is neither completely random nor is it inherently chaotic, nor is it orderly. It's somewhere in between. And dreams reflect a number of personal characteristics that are quite complicated, including how interested you are in dreams.

22:33That is infuriating because it really does give carte blanche to someone like it. It gets like addiction level of being like, all right, well, you want more of this stuff? we'll fill your boots with it. And oh boy, that like, it's interesting that that correlates not just to how vivid your dreams are, but also how quickly the life force of your co-workers is being drained from their bodies. I like personally, I'm not, this annoys people when I say it. So I continue to say it. I don't particularly dream. I can count on my hand the number of times I do. I have that thing where you can't imagine pictures in your head.

23:08There is a word for it, but I can't remember it because I can't picture it in my head. So like when I do have a handful of dreams, they're like, I don't come out with vivid images. I have like a couple of like, I remember like rote tasks performed and they're pretty rote tasks. Like it's, so when I hear people in my life say, oh, I had the most vivid delusion last night that you were all casted. that is fascinating to me i want to know you sound crazy and i would love to hear the complete depths of your psyche please that is fascinating to me it's much better than any other conversation we're ever going to have so i don't i actually quite like the dream thing i will though insist that now that i know it is writing if i am involved as an original character of my own devising i want royalties you need to pay me every time i appear in your dreams including if anyone has dozed off while listening to this podcast, possibly during the Matthew Riley section right now, and are now forced, are now imagining in their dreams, I want you to pull out your dream wallet and I want you to transfer money to me right now.

24:20Apparently, this study also said that one of the biggest effects that people had on dreams was the pandemic, which is sort of the incredibly impressive notion that this once in a generation experience that everybody had at the same time somehow shaped our brains in some way, which is mind-blowing, if you ask me, that that had any kind of psychological impact. So yes, some valuable work being done here. There was an element of that part that I also loved, which is that like, so they were saying that because around the stressful time of COVID and lockdown and stuff, people had dreams that specifically reflected being closed in locked in restrictions of all this sort which is very funny to me that your brain when physically you're locked away says do you know what you have one escape where there are no rules and you have infinite possibilities but we're going to dream up a little cage for you to be in anyway it does make me think that my brain is a bit like an am dram theater society or like a student theater society where like they're asked to make a drama about like, you know, COVID and lockdown.

25:27And their result is to go, I'm in a cage. I'm in a cage. I can't escape. And it's like, wow, that is some broad strokes there, Brain. That is some bad dramaturgy there.

25:39Alice Fraser: That brings us, of course, to the exciting news that OpenAI has opened a Washington office. Apparently there's about$230 ,000 being spent every day lobbying for AI. And apparently AI related issues engage one quarter of all federal lobbyists in Washington right now. So that's 25 % of all lobbyists in Washington are there for the purposes of AI. James Colley, are those meta glasses? Can you unpack this story for us? This is how I feel my bootleg version of the gargoyle, which will be available only on my private channel. So this is OpenAI has Washington lobby office, the workshop strategically located near the White House because OpenAI understand that the internet no longer works.

26:31So you cannot communicate over distances. You need to be as close to Washington as possible if you want to get any work done. And they're seeking to influence policies on data center expansion, copyrighted content thievery depending on all the different ways that they enjoy destroying the world uh this though is a fundamental misstep and mistake from open ai there is no point trying to lobby u.s senators about ai because the fact is firstly u.s senators are about 109 years old on average they have vaguely heard of the computer they believe it's a kind of steam powered genie that brings them hate mail.

27:12Even if you can talk to them, you get their ear, they won't listen because they are very old and hard of hearing. And if they do listen, they will not be able to do anything about it because a significant portion of them at this moment are actively either dead or in comas or somehow halfway between like Schrodinger's senator. So I don't understand what you're going to do other than delude yourself, which is kind of the open AI model. give a large amount of effort to a terrible machine that will then delude you into thinking you have gotten what you want i suppose that they have discovered the u.s senate from first principle so maybe this all is worthwhile is it just me who thinks that like this this whole um like we're so being forced ai is being forced on us so much and if i could draw a comparison to something we've already discussed you know like in jack reacher when he like he grabs someone from behind and sort of tries to chuck them out.

28:08And as he's doing so, he just goes, like that, just kind of like, just accept it. Just accept it. It's all going to be okay. That is exactly how I feel about the way that AI is being pushed on us. It's not subtle. It's not particularly sort of elegant. It is just going, guys, this is happening because we stand to make a lot of money from it. So just kind of roll over. This is all going to be okay. It's all going to be okay. And this is just more proof of that, really. It's so malevolent. And as of yet, no one's really been able to ever explain um what it's like it's net goods it's the same way that i just yeah sorry do you mind if i jump in there do you know the great film the odyssey uh would you like a much worse version of that i um i tell you what that film needed less of for no particular reason uh lupita nyong 'o and if that was something that could uh yeah this is what this is what i worry about it's like it's no material benefit it's like how i absolutely avoided getting uh done by nfts because no one could ever give me a good reason for what an nft was or why it was worth investing in so i just avoided it and this is the same thing it's like no one can sort of go oh here's just an understandable positive so i i remain a skeptic you get a picture of an ape i don't understand what you don't understand about that do you not want a jpeg of an ape do you not bleed are you not human?

29:33I missed out. I mean, I could have had those JPEGs. I feel bad now.

29:41Alice Fraser: This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy. Create your own AI agent today on Monday.com.

29:59Alice Fraser: That brings us to your ad section. Your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by NeuroNudge 3000, the productivity chip that turns your brain into a spreadsheet. Do you ever feel like your thoughts are just unformatted? NeuroNudge inserts a tiny neural implant that converts every idle daydream, thought, spoken word, or horny sex dream into a pivot table. Users report a 40 % increase in productivity and a 100 % decrease in remembering joy. Neuronudge. Sorry, Alice, you've just raised a point that I want to come back on. Wait, wait, wait.

30:39Alice Fraser: I've got one more line. Now compatible with Google Sheets. So you're going to think across devices. Carry on.

30:51We talked about Dream AI, Dream Rewriting. we completely negated the whole idea of sex streams. Now, before this breakthrough discovery, when someone had a sex stream, did they wake up the next one and be like, oh, that happened. There's something that I'm remembering and recounting from the day before. I didn't write that myself. I simply slept with every celebrity.

31:16Hang on. Oh, I need to absolutely rethink my entire life up until now. That is disappointing.

31:25Alice Fraser: And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the NVIDIA Improved Friendship Force, or NAF. You don't believe in AGI, artificial general intelligence. That is to say the premise that LLMs can acquire sentience or operate in a way indistinguishable from consciousness. You think language and images are a learning base that basically precludes the emergence of consciousness because even the best and most beautiful poem is at its best a clumsy abstraction, gesturing at the reality of consciousness and perhaps provoking an emotional response. But what if I told you that an exclusive coalition of chips, GPUs, and cooling fans has come together to define the future of friendship and notably did not invite you specifically, personally, on purpose?

32:07Alice Fraser: Do you think they're people now? The NVIDIA-approved friendship force. NAF, coming for you tomorrow. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the EarnestBot1000, which only communicates in motivational posters, A home butler which tells you only storms make trees take deeper roots when you're asking it to open the door or do your washing up. Hang in there, kid. You've got it. Earn a spot doesn't just solve your problems, it frames them tastefully above your desk. Now available in a limited Live Laugh Litigate edition. And that brings us to our next story. Your AI calorie tracking app is lying to you.

32:53Alice Fraser: apparently. AI apps that take photos of food and tell you how much calories is in that food are apparently incredibly inaccurate. They have always been inaccurate. They never will be accurate, but they may be off by about 345 calories per photograph, which if you've ever used a calorie tracking app, you've not got that many calories to play with. That's heaps. That's like stacks. Tom Neenan, you've eaten food before. Tell us about this story. certainly um you know men you know like menus they have calories on them now you know like they just they'll have like here's a food something that you can order and it'll have calories on it and it's very helpful and it's just printed on some paper the old-fashioned way that's how a lot of people i know are you know sort of working out how many calories are what they're not relying on is uh taking a photo of something where there is always the danger that there is a rogue, you know, hidden beneath a sausage, there is a rogue bit of like raw fat, or there is an incredibly calorie dense piece of like gel or some hule that was like lurking underneath some boiled rice.

34:05I sadly think that these AI things are doing their best and I'm not particularly sympathetic to AI, but just taking a photo of some food does not necessarily mean that or getting an accurate representation of what the food is. For instance, I absolutely love getting a massive plate of chips. That is my favorite thing. Some bacon and chips in a cafe is my favorite. You know, I'll absolutely enjoy that. Those plates are way bigger than average plates. And I can't rely on AI to assume that I am having normal portions. I can't rely on AI to see that this plate is not the size of a satellite dish and I am going absolutely hog wild on it.

34:42Alice Fraser: Well, I mean, this is why you need reference sizings next to all of the food. You cannot trust an AI app unless you're laying your penis next to the food.

34:55It has to be at least four inches. And I was asked to leave Nando's, so that's the problem with all this. They print calories on menus. This is so unnecessary. Once again, AI is proven defunct by just things printed on paper that sort of worked for thousands of years. It's infuriating. It's a real shock to anyone who has listened to any other story this week that an AI over-promised and under-delivered with no consequences for the people using it. This is like, it is a big amount that this is like in every photo, the AI was like, oh, sorry, I missed a McDonald's cheeseburger. like that's i just i skipped over the cheeseburger that you have with every one of your meals i think this is very fun to me like this is a very i know people who go about tracking their food this way it's upsetting i think with this kind of results people might tragically be forced to live their lives and not worry about it so much and they might end up shock horror fat and happy but if that happens then we can plug them into another algorithm and it will promise that if you go in fat and happy very soon you will rapidly lose your happiness so we don't have to worry too much about that into the future this is a funny thing to happen to people i'm sorry this is a funny thing to happen because you have to be a certain level and i understand everyone has different battles and we're trying to use it but if you're doing it this way this is a funny thing to happen i'm sorry i'm gonna enjoy it i'm gonna enjoy it as i i have my lean and delicious jimothy which i know is a strict 250 calories most of it pure protein baby you know what this story reminds me of as well is do you remember um super size me uh where the guy ate loads of mcdonald's like this is an accurate representation of what eating mcdonald's does to your body then tragically that man died and after he died it was sort of revealed that like while he was filming supersize me he was on a lot of drugs he was doing a lot of things a massive alcoholic and then like all the results are like wow that one quarter pounder destroyed your liver this is amazing like it just feels like yeah these these metrics by which we're sort of measuring things there's a there's a million different factors that could be skewing them so you know while it's very sad that he um that he passed away it's hilarious that he uh basically the thing he's most famous for is going i am going to show you the effects on your body of one specific thing completely ignoring the myriad other things he was doing to his body which were were slowly destroying it so that is yeah it just shows that these things could never really be accurate i i think i might by far be the most evil guest of the gargle rotation because just Just remembering that man's liver problem really made me laugh.

37:58Alice Fraser: Speaking of making you laugh, terraforming Mars may be more realistic than scientists once thought, but we're not sure why that is or who is funding the sciences. Apparently new technologies have reopened the debate over whether Mars could someday be terraformed, but there are obviously some risks at hand. If you don't know what terraforming is, it's sort of a science fiction concept. It's never been done before effectively, but we all dream that it's possible that you can reshape a planet or moon to be able to support human and other Earth-like life. In theory, that would mean changing the atmosphere, climate and the surface.

38:33Alice Fraser: If it's Mars, you'd have to also change the magnetosphere so that stuff stayed where it was meant to go, like the atmosphere. But the idea basically is that over a number of centuries you could have microorganisms making oxygen and releasing greenhouse gases, some of the propositions that have been put forward. James Colley, again, you're wearing that jacket. Can you tell us more about this story? This is one of the most useless stories I have ever read in my life. This was a paper made for the Green Mars Workshop by a company, Pioneer Labs, who seem to mostly specialize in wanting to terraform things.

39:18I imagine if you are at the Green Mars Workshop and you are looking at the keynote speech on day one, coming in and saying, actually, I think we are all pissing away our time here would be a real downer. So you might have to start your speech with, oh, yeah, it could be possible. One of their aims coming into here was that they would not waste time. Rather than asking whether terraforming violates the laws of physics, researchers believe the more important questions are whether humanity should pursue it and what the path would look like. So don't focus on whether it's possible. Let's just work on it for a bit and then we'll decide.

39:55Now, here are some of the things that would need to happen for this to be possible. uh raise temperatures by roughly 30 degrees celsius so you could start melting the ice reserves how would you do that i'll get back to you uh researchers propose engineering extremophiles which i believe are people who have sex with x game players uh who uh would naturally survive in the harsh environments how do we do that i will work on it uh create an oxygen rich atmosphere which would take centuries and likely much longer so instead researchers envision beginning inside enormous domed habitats about 100 meters tall, which is a real great, like about 100 meters.

40:34Do you know what? That's a nice round number. Why not 100 meters tall for this glass dome we are going to put on here? And then the other problems are like, oh, but there are some issues. You know, we don't know how to do any of this. We don't know what lies beneath the ice sheets. We don't know what will happen with dust storms. Does it have enough of the materials we need to actually do this? We'd have to bring all this stuff from Earth. Do you know what? There's no real way to let's just hit the bar at the conference because I think we might not have much of a story here. It's just like it would be great to terraform Mars and maybe it's more possible.

41:08It's not, but maybe it's more possible in that to be like 0.0001 % is better than half of that number. So it is more possible.

41:20Alice Fraser: Where's your vision, James? Do you think the Wright brothers, you know, thought about the logistics of human flight before they imagined flying? Or do you think they just imagined flying and jumped off a cliff? You have to work backwards from your hopes and dreams. Look, I think there is room for dreaming and imagining and hoping for a future. In this case, it would be a very long-term future, the very fastest possible application of all of this technology. If we could invent it and apply it right now, it would take about 1 ,000 years to get even the oxygen element at play. But look, I feel like going to Mars has been ruined by the fans.

42:06Alice Fraser: It's like Rick and Morty. You know, it's a perfectly pleasant conceptual framework that has been colonized by colonizers. All I'm saying is I am not certain we are making the next FIFA World Cup. Can we please like just get get a couple of plates shaking a little bit less before we start forward planning the mars home guys i don't want to go galaxy brain on you here but as far as as far as i know terraforming terra meaning earth uh is making a planet more like earth now there are two ways of doing that you go to mars and you make mars a lot more like earth or you take the earth and what we're doing at the minute, which is slowly make it less and less habitable.

42:51So you're actually making it more like Mars. Either way, you are slightly terraforming Mars. And I think that's a more achievable goal. And we should look towards achieving that one. Maybe what Elon Musk is doing is exactly that. He's not remaking the Odyssey. He's remaking John Carter by taking all the resources from this planet and making it uninhabitable and filled with horrible monsters that you wouldn't want to share a planet with.

43:15Alice Fraser: And our final story for today is that a 500 ,000-year-old elephant bone hammer, that was my nickname in high school, shows ancient humans were master tool makers, apparently. And these are English humans. These are humans who were based in England, apparently sharpening tools with an elephant hammer 500 ,000 years ago. Does that make you feel national pride, Tom Neenan? It really does. So we have just said goodbye to our, I know this isn't a political podcast, but I think it's something like our 37th prime minister in four days or whatever it is. I've sort of lost count. But the most recent, before this one, Andy Burnham, the most recent prime minister was Keir Starmer.

44:05And it became a meme over here. It became like something that people would almost like take a shot whenever it happened, when he would talk about being the son of a toolmaker. He would say, I was the son of a toolmaker a lot because that feels like a good, it's an honest job. You work with your hands, you're grafting. And, you know, it's something that it's something that kind of makes you feel like, you know, he was a human rights lawyer. That's too highfalutin. That's too clever. But his dad was a toolmaker. And all that's told us in the UK and in England now is that actually we are all the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandsons of toolmakers.

44:43um and that's satisfying what yeah well exactly and it makes me say it does fill me with pride it fills me with pride that we were out there you know working working the earth working with our hands um i think that i just know this is sort of my most right-wing belief is that uh no one should leave school without having made something out of wood using a saw and something just to have that kind of in their heads. A device out of a Powerade bottle, a bit of hose, a little bit of aluminium foil. Oh, I see. I see. I mean, even that, at least there's some ingenuity there. I think, you know, no matter what you've ended up doing, you know, I just think create something, even if it's sellotaping tomatoes to a certain plant to make it look better from afar.

45:44I think that, yeah, that people should be able to create things. And this gives me inspiration that they were doing it all the way back then as well. I'm proud of my ancestors. I get a feeling this has a bit of like the 2001 A Space Odyssey to it. I think like in general, most creatures at this time, most of the hominids at this time were using like bones from, let's say a dog, like deer of some kind. And one prick had the elephant bone. And you know, you know, we made a big deal out of the elephant bone every time. Oh, you, you still using the, the ocelot. Well, I found, and he didn't even kill the elephant.

46:26We know he didn't kill the elephant. He just found an elephant bone, obviously. And they're not hard to find their big things. He probably found a zoo. He found a malnourished elephant in a zoo, took a bone, and then used it to beat up everyone else. I feel like it's time to cancel this particular hominid. I don't care for him. I feel like he is the one who broke Jimothy's back if that is what happened to Jimothy. I haven't researched the story. There are things called elephant graveyards. That is a phrase because it exists because there are places in the world where elephants go to die and then they leave their bones exposed and those are readily available.

47:05This person just sort of stumbled across one of the resources of which there are most abundance at the time, which is elephant bones, and was like, right, okay, this is my way to the top. It's like basically the people who make Yorkshire steel or something. They're like, great, this is what I do now. I make elephant hammers because that's what I have access to. I'm so sorry. I'll be damned before I go on the gargle and celebrate an ivory poacher. I do not believe this was the right thing to do, frankly.

47:39Alice Fraser: Yeah, yeah. That's it. 500 ,000 years ago, you are going to travel back in time and start Peter. That's the name of the guy. It's called Peter. The full name of the society is Fuck Peter. well apparently elephant bone tools have been found at alderwey gorge in tanzania with some dating far as far back as 1.5 million years but this is the first time i found it in uh in the uk and uh apparently it was most likely an early sort of a humanoid hominid kind of creature uh or a neanderthal which is quite fun and to think of them hammering away They used it to play cricket. Now that's a story. Well, we don't know that they didn't.

48:29Alice Fraser: All they know is that this bone had impacts and chips off it from repeated impacts. So perhaps they were just playing cricket real hard. Well, in that case, you've got to hit it off the middle of the bone. What are you doing? You're nicking this bone all around the place. This is what Baz Ball gets you, England. You cannot be swinging wildly at every, let's assume, rock or pigeon thrown at your elephant bone. This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. Reese, our content agent, wrote the copy based on our best practices, like mentioning Monday.com three times. That was the second.

49:05Alice Fraser: Johnny, our coordination agent, built the timeline and kept everyone aligned. Olivia, our human creative director, stayed in the loop. Because agents are great, but they don't always know when a joke lands. She had one note. Tell listeners it only takes minutes to build an agent. So, minutes. Create your own AI agent today on Monday.com.

49:27Alice Fraser: And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. Tom Neenan, where can people find and support your work? Oh, follow me at tpneenan on Instagram, where I'll be giving details of various things. Please visit there. Or tomneenan.com, where I've got some, if you want to buy some of my art, that's there. And of course, the main thing, the main headline of it all, there is a link to buy tickets to my Edinburgh show, which starts this time next week, which I've been having anxiety dreams about, which, as we all know, is me processing the world where I am terrified of Edinburgh. There's a big surprise.

50:07So, yes, please visit me there. And if you want to come along and do a doubleheader of myself now at the Edinburgh Fringe, that would be a fun thing to do.

50:17Alice Fraser: Yeah, do it, do it, do it. James Colley, where can people find and support your work? On Instagram at jamcolley is probably a good place to start. If you are in Australia or know how to access a VPN, I suppose, you can go on ABC iview and watch the latest season of Gruen. It is a show about advertising and it has been running for about 18 years. And by all accounts, the latest season is the best one yet. So check it out. That's a pretty good review. That's a full adult of a show and we're getting better at it. So that's a good sign. that is an extreme sign uh you i've we're all plugging instagram i've got an instagram i never plug it it's alicefrazahuman over on instagram i'm also on the blue sky where you can sign up and follow my work or the best bet i for me where i put everything through is the patreon patreon.com slash alicefraz you can subscribe there for free or for money i'm not going to stop you doing the money but it is sort of just my mailing list it's my one-stop shop uh where you can find all all of my stuff that's going on.

51:14Alice Fraser: I will be in Oslo this Friday night at the New Theatre Grönalöcke and I will be at 9pm doing a Passion for Passion for the very last time. Feel free to come buy the big red dress. I don't want to bring it back. So I'll be there. I'll be selling books and signing books. That is this Friday, the what date is it? The last day of July, whichever one that is. the last day of July, Friday, 9pm, the 31st of July at the new theatre, Grona Locker. And that's it. Then it'll be Edinburgh. Edinburgh at 8.40pm at the Tron. This is a Bugle Podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner.

51:58Alice Fraser: I'll talk to you again next time.

52:04Alice Fraser: This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. Reese, our content agent, wrote the copy based on our best practices, like mentioning Monday.com three times. That was the second. Johnny, our coordination agent, built the timeline and kept everyone aligned. Olivia, our human creative director, stayed in the loop because agents are great, but they don't always know when a joke lands. She had one note. Tell listeners it only takes minutes to build an agent. So, minutes. Create your own AI agent today on monday.com.