Jake the Rizzbot and a Social Media ban for Under 16s!

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. Welcome to The Gargle, a satirical science and technology news show. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, comedian, writer, and the only person who I can explain both quantum entanglement and Dunning-Kruger theory. Or rather, I very confidently will have been about to be able to tell you that at the same time as my alternate self will.

0:39Alice Fraser: But then we'll learn another fact and tip over into realizing I know nothing. Here to help me hot take spit take or hot spit take the latest from labs, launch pads and lizard brains, I have two brand new co-hosts who know how to rinse, repeat and gargle science and technology jargon. Jargon first. She's the pioneer scientist who asked the question, what gender Tania Twain feels like? It's Rosie Holt. Hello. Thank you very much for having me. It's a delight. And he's the talent manager of the albatross in the rhyme of the ancient mariner, crawling with legs into the gargle for the first time. It's Robin Cliffan.

1:16Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

1:18Alice Fraser: I'm delighted to have you both. Our front cover news of this week. cosmic corpse baffles astronomers in the galactic downtown. NASA has spotted a possible supernova remains right next to the Milky Way supermassive black hole. The suspected supernova remnant sitting just 26 ,000 light years from Earth in the galactic center, expanding at 2 million miles an hour, which sounds menacing, but basically only if you plan to live for another couple of billion years to see how it goes. An indestructible sponge has been squeezed for its secrets, ready for human trial maybe in 50 years. Russian scientists have sequenced the genome of Halasaka Dujardini, the creature that laughs at death.

1:57Alice Fraser: Ha ha ha ha ha. As much as sponge can laugh, it's a marine sponge. It can completely regenerate after being put into a blender, torn into individual cells. They can find each other and reassemble into a whole organism. Scientists have now sequenced the genome and are hoping to one day trigger similar processes in humans, which sounds appalling. Rosie, would you like to be reassembled from your blended constituent parts? Yeah, I think that sounds really lovely. Why not? And it's a new start, isn't it? It's a new start. It's just building from the old but making something new. Delightful. And a social media ban for under-16s has come into effect in the UK, following, as always, as with time zones in Australia's footsteps.

2:40Alice Fraser: Robin, how do you feel about the under-16s being banned from society? Yes, I think they deserve to be banned. They don't deserve any joy. And all the fun should go to pensioners just living their life and their massive houses and their triple lock pensions. So double down the pain on the young people, that's what I say. Look, I think it's been a great thing for Australia insofar as, you know, they did eventually have to ban toddlers from driving tractors. And we all know that social media is just, you know, bad for you. Exactly. And I do hope it's kind of like a sliding scale. Like, you know, we start in all seriousness.

3:14We start by banning it with children. But like with alcohol and cigarettes, we decided they were bad for children first. And then it maybe woke up they were also not particularly helpful for adults and maybe had some systematic problems with our attention spans, possibly ruining democracy and our individual lives as well. So maybe it's the beginning of all that tech regulation legislation that we so desperately need.

3:36Alice Fraser: I mean, maybe, maybe in 20 years time, you'll go down to the servo and spend$30 for the opportunity to call a stranger online. Exactly. You can pay for your hate rather than just have it freely and pay in your attention span and being groomed for advertising. Yeah. And that brings us to this week's top stories. Top story of the top stories this week. El Nino has begun. I've written a poem to farewell La Nina, our princess. Goodbye, chilled out queen of the eastern Pacific. Your trade winds were fierce. Your upswellings terrific. You flooded Australia and froze the Midwest and made for some mild summer days at your best.

4:14Very good.

4:15Alice Fraser: La Nina, the wet, cold lady of weather, has been cast from her throne, presumably by the manosphere and replaced with hot, hot El Nino. Rosie, you've faced an oncoming headwind before. Can you unpack this story for us? So El Nino, am I even pronouncing it right? El Nino? El Nino. El Nino. I think that sounds sexy anyway, is the natural Pacific weather pattern that pushes up global temperatures. And it's officially begun, though they say that we're really going to see the effects in 2027. But it's going to make there's obviously been a little thing called climate change going on in the last last few years.

5:02And this is going to make things considerably worse. So strap in, everyone.

5:08Alice Fraser: Well, as with all events in life, you know, anything that is already happening that is going bad can be exponentially made more difficult by the introduction of a hysterical little boy running around just making things wetter. Robin, do you have any plans for meteorological jazz time when everything's going to be going up and down and back and forth and winds and floods and rains? What's your strategy? I think my plan is probably to buy more fans and I don't mean in a kind of persuade people to pay people to come to my Edinburgh shows or kind of buy them on Instagram but I already have four fans in my room I'm absolutely pathetic in the heat so I've got no confidence about me being able to survive extreme weather events and obviously we're already in the foothills of it I've already got four fans I've already done incredibly embarrassing things like last year in Croatia I became so disorientated by the heat that I had to quickly leave a beach, lost my way in a wood, and found myself back at the car, but had accidentally put both the air conditioning and the underseat heating on.

6:14So I think there's a strong chance that in hot weather conditions, I will lose my mind.

6:20Alice Fraser: And look, everybody wants a cool face and a hot spot. I think you've made exact right choices in that circumstance. Rosie, what are your plans for when things go wild? I mean, I like what you were saying, Robin, about putting what, so you had the air con and the heat on in your car. That's like you're creating El Nino in your car. Yeah, it's a kind of microclimate. Totally. You're doing your own thing. And I like that. You're standing against what's going on outside and having your own El Nino in the car. And I quite like to emulate that just wherever I go in the house. or in the car. You know, who cares what's going on outside?

6:59We are in the golden age of climate change, though, I think. So the weather has been quite nice in the UK, at least. Yeah, we're in, are we in the kind of lobster enjoying the water stage before it frantically taps and crawls out? Totally. And I think it's important we enjoy this stage. I do miss the seasons. I do miss having kind of spring and autumn, which are filled with kind of possibility and autumn with ennui. And now I feel it's just freezing cold and then 80 degrees and there's nothing in between. So we're going to miss nuance, I feel.

7:27Alice Fraser: Forget, leave them behind, leave them in the past. Don't look behind you. March into our glorious, terrifying future.

7:37Alice Fraser: And that brings us to your reviews section. As you know, each week we ask our guests in to review something out of five stars. Robin, what have you brought in for us to review? I'd like to give five out of five stars to screaming at the top of your voice into a microphone with loads of metal heads. I can recommend it as deeply cathartic, good for the soul and possibly opening one of the portals into hell. I was recently at a music festival and I hosted a death metal scream competition. And boy, is that therapeutic. Yeah, screaming, yelping, sometimes you sound like a kind of demon. Other times you sound like a kind of very confused goat or someone who's just kind of smoked 80 Marlboros a day, which is what my voice is now sounding like, a kind of cross between Tarmac and Bovril or whatever's happened.

8:26But standing with loads of other people and screaming is incredibly, yeah, incredibly, I'd say, primal. And you let go of whatever sheesh you were carrying until you got into that moment. Don't do it by yourself. I think you do need a lot of bearded and unbearded people in black denim and leather to make it appear normal. so yeah I'd highly recommend screaming at the top of your lungs with loads of metal heads

8:50Alice Fraser: into a microphone yeah I mean how out of five stars how would you rank that I would give that 4.9 out of five the only point percentage kind of point decimal decrease there is the high chance that you're going to catch someone else's cold how do you rank screaming anyway other than obviously the the mechanism that they applied in Monsters, Inc. Yeah, depth, breadth and gravel, I think are the three ingredients. Yeah, how far can you project it? How rich is it? Is it kind of creamy like a thick milk or is it light like a thin soup? And how basey is it? And how far does it travel? And how terrifying is it?

9:35I think those are the many criteria that you could use, yeah.

9:38Alice Fraser: Rosie, what have you brought us to review out of five stars? It's a late night strategy board game, But with a crucial ingredient of if the designated games master is wasted and stoned. Amazing. How was that? How did that go down? Well, I would give it a 3.5 out of 5. Still fun, still great, but everything takes a lot longer. And you can, especially because, you know, sometimes with these strategy games, there's quite a lot of like rules and things like that. And if you're like me and you're not really a regular player, you've been coerced into it. And then if the games master is quite stoned or wasted or whatever, then you might find that after an hour and a half, he's missed out a key bit and you have to restart the whole game again.

10:28But fun still to be had.

10:30Alice Fraser: That sounds amazing. Late night stoned strategy board game with a drunken dungeon master sounds a little bit like a religious view of the world. where God is high. I like it. There's all these rules and they don't necessarily make a lot of sense, but you will be punished for breaking them. That's the end of your review section. Now it is time for Jake, the Rizbot. There's a lot of doom and gloom about technology at the moment with everybody worried about our jobs getting stolen and not so much about the post-job utopia that awaits all of us. There is a new autonomous sensation roaming the streets of Austin, Texas, known as Jake the Rizbot.

11:16Alice Fraser: He wears a cowboy hat. He says cool stuff. He wears a silver chain and yellow and black Nike dunks and a knockoff cowboy hat. Robin, you've been seen in a knockoff cowboy hat before. Sure have. You'd knock a cowboy hat off if it was on your head by accident. I would. I mean, what's quite perturbing about this robot as well is he's just wearing a cowboy hat. so it does kind of stress the fact that he's naked everywhere else. And this robot, I have to say, forgive my blue language, but he is a dick. He just walked through town roasting people. And this is to quote him directly. I think he just walks up to someone and says he's going to use them like a USB port.

11:55So it's horrible. It's not nice. And he's flipping them the finger constantly. And he also has a security guard, I've noticed. He wanders around town with a big, beefy person who can intervene at any point should he provoke the locals?

12:10Alice Fraser: Well, moreover, as with so many of these technological breakthroughs, he is not fully autonomous. He is being remote controlled by a wireless controller, presumably in an unmarked white van that is following him slowly down the street. The thing that he is ostensibly sort of groundbreaking in is that he's blending AI-assisted motion with real-time commands. But I feel like you can't really call him an autonomous robot if there's somebody with a hand up his butt. Exactly. It seems like quite a good analogy for AI or the internet in general, which is it promises an awesome, either dystopian or possibly utopian future, but actually what it delivers on is juvenile entertainment, which is possibly the most arresting thing.

12:55Alice Fraser: Rosie, would you take a picture if a robot came and hit on you in the street? Yes, I would take a picture. I would do it for the gram. I think it's important to do things for the gram. I think we've been slightly spoiled though, haven't we, by things like, he still sort of doesn't even quite look like Short Circuit. He looks a little bit unsteady and pathetic. I'm not, you know, I think we've been a bit spoiled now by the movies. We go, is this it? Is this what we've got? And as you say, he's just some man as well who's controlling him. I'm not a fan of Jake the Rizbot. I think if you're going to have a robot and you're going to give it a personality, why is it the worst personality?

13:33Exactly. Yeah.

13:36Alice Fraser: Like the only thing that justifies that kind of like finger guns, douchebag behaviour is the concept somewhere in the back of your mind that it'll make someone fall onto your dick. And this robot doesn't have a dick. No. Maybe he will and maybe that's the next stage. A terrifying new stage. He just has a smooth kind of metal orb at the moment, which is equally as scary. And that brings us to more Inhuman Nature news, which is apparently throughout time, throughout history, across cultures, humans, when given the option of which way to turn, will turn left. Anticlockwise, they're going to Zoolander it by preference almost all of the time.

14:19Alice Fraser: It's a left turn bias of which we have no exact known mechanic. I have a friend who's a sword fighter who does sword fighting, and he says it's to protect your heart, that your default is to protect your heart, which is on the left hand side. I wonder if people who have their hearts on the other side, some people do, would default turn in the opposite direction. I don't know. Robin, you're slowly sliding to the left. Can you unpack this story for us? I am. I largely think this story reveals the inherent human desire to be a little bit progressive. We all just move slightly to the left through life.

14:55So as a member of the Wokurati, I'd like to see it as evidence of the innate human nature to base politics on compassion and progression. But yeah, the story is quite interesting. It's just that. And it happens across generations, across cultures. And it also happens across ages as well. Yeah. So they tested it with primary school children, with adults, and with people who are right and left handed. So that doesn't seem to be a factor. I think it does tell you why when you get lost, you feel like you're going in circles. Because if you're just to walk in a straight line, you'd probably leave the place.

15:26But faced with an empty deserts and no clear signposts and without a compass you will most likely just go around in a big anti-clockwise circle.

15:36Alice Fraser: I mean what an amazing what an amazing period of history well that you have an entire group of scientists whose job is left left directionality focus grouping. Rosie do you feel like you have a theory as to why this is happening? No it is really really fascinating when I first read it I felt a bit smug as a left-hander I felt like that it was because we're controlling the narrative in some way but actually the when they were doing the the experiments they they to begin with they thought well if you're left-handed you're probably going to more veer right wing right wing oh god what a slip of the tongue bring the politics bill Harry left-handed you you're gonna you're more likely to veer the right but then they found that that that wasn't the case it was just most people were veering to left but it's really really interesting I hope it's for some higher purpose I hope it's something that's going to become clear in many, many years to come.

16:31Maybe like it's the only direction into the spaceship that's about to leave Earth in 3050. Robin, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yes, that's a good point. Yes, a magical door will open. It'll be on everyone's left. It's a portal to the magical door of metal.

16:44Alice Fraser: I mean, it's been going for ages. In the 1896 modern Olympics, the first modern Olympics, it was a clockwise direction around the running track. but athletes all said they felt like it was an unnatural direction to run in. Do you think, because it says nearly everyone everywhere veers left, why do you think there are a few people who aren't? Are they special? Yeah, possibly. Contrarians have a podcast about it. If they found all the people veering right were ones, people with podcasts. They were people with podcasts where they talk about their opinions. exactly and they'll be the only people left on earth when all the left-handing people took going to the spaceship in 2050 yeah and then the earth will be nothing but podcast yes just podcasters talking to themselves kind of like now i'm already at the point where i will have to resist the temptation i do this on a regular basis i have to resist the temptation to end a conversation in real life by saying and where can people find you online

17:46Alice Fraser: speaking of which that brings us to the 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 kachu the subscription-based immune system for too many years our health has been at the whims of chance germs biology and hygiene now no longer kachu allows you to schedule your illness and immunity in a way that serves your needs. Sick of getting brutally sick the moment you finish a massive project? Try drip feeding symptoms through your whole life instead. Tired of your body fighting off germs without your consent? Upgrade to our tiered immunity plan.

18:21Alice Fraser: Basic common cold defence only coughs cost extra. Premium plus includes flu consumption and mysterious toddler diseases. Cancel any time but beware our cancellation fee is a deliberately engineered three week norovirus terms and conditions apply. Catch you. Gotta catch them all. Bye now and your first fever is free. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by CRISPR deodorant. Edit your armpit bacteria. Blame your ancestors later. Are you tired of smelling like a person? Our gene editing roll-on permanently as silences the olfactory receptors of every microbe within a 10 centimetre radius.

18:53Alice Fraser: They don't know what they smell like. Why should you? And that's your ad section for today. And that brings us to trillionaire news. Now, new trillionaire has dropped. First trillionaire. Elon Musk has become the first trillionaire with the launch of SpaceX as a publicly traded company. Rosie Holt, you're a big Elon Musk stan. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, couldn't have happened to a nicer chap. So he is the world's first trillionaire. But there has been quite a lot of controversy over this. I found the most interesting part of this was that according to a UK-based anti-poverty charity, well, Oxfam, as most people know it, Musk's wealth now exceeds that of the poorest 3.8 billion people in the world combined, which is an awful lot.

19:49And I think Gene McLean, who's the chief influencing officer at Oxfam, said this should be a wake-up call and this is a dark day for global democracy. So well done, Elon. Congratulations. But not so good for the rest of us. I mean, it's extraordinary. It's so, I can't even, I mean, I always struggle getting my head around being a billionaire. A trillionaire is, it's very extreme.

20:18Alice Fraser: Yeah, I've got those little blocks where I'm teaching my children how much 10 is compared to one and how much 100 is compared to 10 and so on and so forth. I mean, they don't got blocks big enough for that particular thought experiment and I don't want to vacuum them up at the end of the day. Robin? Yeah, I think it's such a good point. I think it's so hard to visualize those big numbers. And I think it's actually a real problem politically. For example, with track and trace, which was all that all those years ago now, if you remember, that was 37 billion. And I almost felt like it was such an enormous number.

20:50And one reason it didn't get as much political traction as it should have done is it doesn't sound as big as 300 million or something else. We as humans need to find a way, I think, of communicating how big these numbers are when faced with things that we've never seen before, extreme wealth that is unique historically. I mean, one thing I found amazing about this is that it's all based on speculation. It's based largely on AI speculation. And most AI isn't making any money yet. It's got a return, a huge amount of cash on investment. And we're kind of at the foothills of them experimenting with how they're actually going to get some income.

21:25And that's a terrifying place to be. It's a place where, you know, OpenAI have just started doing advertising. People are having more and more relationships with AI bots and AI personalities. So it could be that you date someone who is ultimately sponsored by BP or Shell or Coca-Cola. So we are very much headfirst into the corporate hellscape.

21:45Alice Fraser: I mean, yeah, it is interesting watching them turn all of the AI things upside down and shake them to see if any change comes out of their pockets to justify the investment. I mean, the premise is that it will invent its way out of the problems that it has caused by being created, which is to say you've got to back it to be intelligent enough to figure out how to make itself valuable, which, you know, I've got a cousin who still hasn't done that. So I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that's a good I mean, it's such a bet, isn't it? And it's such a gamble. And I also think this thing of having increasingly complicated systems that we don't have a human in the loop with that we don't understand and very analogous to the financial system, I think, which is a complicated integrated system and um as the world gets more complex our political messaging gets more simple and that creates quite violent convulsions so it's interesting because i think there's a kind of a silicon valley resentment of the artistic intellectual uh quote-unquote elite looking down on yeah sort of techie uh spectrumy people for not being cool and not being uh sort of engaged in the arts and this backlash against them as and this creation of the technocrat as somebody who is capable of enacting real change in the world doing you know they're the ones who are doing the real stuff in the world whereas artists and intellectuals and academics are all just sort of floating around in the realm of ideas i think we have well and truly proven this ai is uh the realm of ideas applied to reality some of its incredible technology like particularly in the medical and data crunching spheres.

23:24Alice Fraser: But anytime it tries to write a poem, I feel... You feel reassured. I feel reassured. As somebody who has just literally demonstrated my ability to write a very bad poem, I still feel like it's better than that. I really agree with that. I did think that at the start of AI, we felt like everyone was saying, hey, you should do coding and you should get into these tech jobs. One thing AI can do very well is coding and certain tech capacity. what it can't do is the human stuff the value stuff and the artistic stuff so maybe there's hope for us yet hey coders learn hand jobs yeah hey coders learn how to have a sense of ennui i said i want to see the first ai edinburgh fringe show that's what i want that little robot guy can come on well come see my show it's called oh man and i teach a sentient ai roomba how to become a man.

24:14Alice Fraser: It's not a real AI room, but it's just a pretend one. But still pretty fun. Oh, my goodness, we are up to our penultimate story for the day. But time is an illusion. And also that's the story. The story is that time is an illusion. They've created a toy universe that shows that time could be just a feature of sort of quantum stuff clacking itself together. Rosie, you've looked at a watch before. Can you tell me how time is an illusion? Yes, I do think time is an illusion because it just depends on what you're looking at, doesn't it? You're looking at a watch. You're looking at the Internet. Some things could be different.

24:55It may feel you might wake up at the wrong time, might feel different. What is it really? Who decided it?

25:01Alice Fraser: So basically, they built this toy model of the cosmos and they've seen the ways in which quantum interactions produce time, which is the kind of sentence that makes my brain fold in on itself and it's also the kind of sentence that led to me starting the gargle as a podcast because I need to figure out how to wrap my brain around this uh Robin would you what would you look at if you had your own little toy universe what would I look at oh my god um I'd I suppose I'd look at the kind of um the rise and um the rise and fall of ourselves civilization feel a deep sense of ennui maybe start writing poetry gazing out the window, reminiscing about past universes, and then getting tangled up in the joy of them as we slowly drift apart in increasingly isolated spaces.

25:48Entropy consumes us all. That's probably how I'd feel about it. I did find this, I was trying to wrap my head around it, and it's incredibly difficult to understand. And as ever, you know, as the public, you know, we don't really understand numbers, we barely understand science, do we, speaking personally as a lay person rather than a scientist but I loved the idea that this was uh correct me if I'm wrong but it's basically saying like time can be an emergent property of quantum relationships um rather than something that's just obviously it's since classical physics it's not something that's external to gravity and it's relational but oh my god Alice please tell us what do you think is that what it's trying to say have I got it sort of right you have got that sort of right

26:33Alice Fraser: And from a layperson's perspective, it's like how, you know, if time emerges from the property of quantum things relating to one another, it's sort of like how the will they, won't they quantumness of Ross and Rachel produced seven seasons of Friends. My favourite bit of this story was Giovanni Barantini at the University of Birmingham in the UK. the whole reason he started thinking about time as an emergent property was he was watching his six-year-old son play and he said quote he was building his own small universe and I was thinking that's pretty much what we also do in our labs when we build I'm not going to keep doing yet then I was starting to think that this is also quite boring as a universe because there's not much going on there and if nothing happens it's like if time is not passing by sick burn on his six-year-old son's boring universe by the way but I think that's such a delightful way to get into like quantum mind fuckery yeah and I like the idea I mean this is probably a very kind of a scientific reading of it but it had this kind of human resonance which is when nothing happens time passes very slowly and stands still and when there's action it flies by that seemed to be sort of the kind of very broad message you could take from it which um which I liked and felt very resident in our own lives yeah that's a beautiful thing speaking of beautiful things it's the end of this podcast i'm flipping through the ad section at the back uh rosie holt have you got anything to plug um yes i am working on a show at the moment called rosie holt the illegal aliens have landed uh which i'm taking to edinburgh but i'm then going on a uk tour with um so tickets are available now.

28:14Alice Fraser: Get the tickets, Rosie Holt. Illegal aliens have landed. Where in Edinburgh? What time? 6.30 in the Pleasance Courtyard. Oh, fancy. Robin, what about you? Have you got anything to plug? Are we doing real plugs here or are we inventing fun? Real plugs. Real ones. I thought aliens had landed felt so in tune with the show, Rosie, that maybe you just like wrapped it out. um yes i um i've got a relaxation comedy ambient podcast called roger's velvet rendezvous which is available wherever you get your podcasts which i'd love to direct you to um and i also have a show called thinking deeply which is conversations with academics about attention and ai and some other exciting um discussions about moments that we're in uh so i'd love for anyone listening to also listen to them or join me just screaming into the void at a metal fest sometime you should get my twin brother on he's a he's what's he oh my god in the uh ai regulation in australia i love that i'm at you have i'm actually a twin as well you know oh what's your twin um she's a woman called amy yeah amy well mine's a twin brothers but i'm not a twin i didn't want to be completely left out we should have a podcast it's their birthday today oh my god happy birthday to your twins that aren't your twin yeah do they celebrate together they have they didn't celebrate together they didn't celebrate together okay we have a sister podcast it's called realms unknown if you like science fiction fantasy uh that is also in under the bugle umbrella i also do a podcast called tea with alice where i have interesting conversations uh difficult conversations with interesting people and that is ramping itself back up i also occasionally co-host uh ai and the creative professional talking about how if you are a creative professional uh what is coming down the pipeline at you and how you can manage it or not as you see fit i uh am doing the gargle live on the 26th of june at the bill murray and there is a bunch of shows of work in progresses of my show Oh Man coming up as well as filming in Cardiff at the Canopy on a date.

30:35Alice Fraser: I'm filming A Passion for Passion and Oh Man together if you want to come and watch me do two shows there and happen to be in Wales. If you can find all of my shows over at alicefraser.com and the Geeks page is available that's it for me this is a bugle podcast and alice fraser production your editor is harry gordon your executive producer is chris skinner i'll talk to you again next week