Off Air... with Jane and Fi - You've declared yourself a cockle convert

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Jane and Fi discover the benefits of Sea Moss with Sea Moss Boss boss Tee McKen. They're joined by Dr Anne Marie Imafidon, the youngest ever girl to pass A level computing and founder of Stemettes, about her new book 'She's In Ctrl'. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: Kate Lee Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Podcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Right, well you've made a very, I'm going to start kind of a movement there, Jane. Yes, I did. I moved. I thought it was very assertive and I don't know why because it's not really me. I'm not a particularly assertive individual. I'm angry with myself because I left a very interesting email outside from a lady who used to go on holiday to her mum's village in County Sligo. And they would collect, you could buy at the corner shop little bags of seaweed which you would eat and it was, everybody did it, it was like a treat. And we talked on the programme today about the benefits of sea moss

which I thought, you know, I actually ate a spoonful of it. You're very good. No, and you didn't really. So far I've managed to avoid every single one of the Wellness Wednesday challenges. Also, in Foodie Thursday, I had loads more cockles than you. And it's just a plain fact, I did. I know.

I mean, I've enjoyed them, but I haven't, I've seen them since in the supermarché. And I just think, would I eat a cockle if I were to buy a whole jar? Well, you declared yourself to be a cockle converted. Did I? Okay. Well, I didn't... Yeah, I did enjoy them on the... Anyway, this is neither here nor there. It's Foodie Thursday tomorrow with long-suffering Times food editor

Tony Turnbull, who last week brought in his pick of this year's mince pies from high street stores. I wonder what tomorrow will be street stores i wonder what tomorrow will be i do wonder what i'm very very much hoping it's pigs and blankets uh oh i'm having some of those tonight are you yes i just thought oh i really gone early well i you know sometimes they they claim that they sell out don't they i mean they don't of course uh but i saw them the other day i thought i'll just treat myself because um we do have there's quite a good brand of vegetarian vegan sausage that the other my flatmate child will eat and sometimes i want to

you know out of solidarity i'll also have a vegan sausage but and do you wrap them in faking i think faking although available is not doesn't please well i mean it's it's really hard you see i don't know whether what other people think about this and that they can they can tell us uh via our email address jayden fee at times dot radio um i'm intrigued by the fact that vegetarians and vegan want meat product shaped items yes i don't really get it i think that's been of concern ever since somebody decided to call just eating vegetables and not meat vegetarianism. Yeah, no, I think you're right. People just got on with it. I mean, I was a vegetarian for seven years in my sort of late teens and early 20s, and I just ate vegetables.

Yeah, and presumably... And gravy, weirdly. There was sauce mix, wasn't there, around that time? Yeah, but I didn't bother with that because i couldn't cook well no but also the i thought sauce mix was interesting because i don't remember ever being sold as sausages so you just bought this thing you can make whatever you wanted to out of it but it but it wasn't being paste from what i remember it wasn't being made to look like meat i don't think it's available anymore is it not i always rather liked it did you yeah my sister was a vegan actually early vegan for quite a while so sauce mix was um it's quite a thing but my i mean my poor mum uh so she'll quite often have to cook you know two separate meals and one of her

favorite meals to cook would be liver and onions which would be served you know from the same oven as sauce mix and chips i mean you can't go you can't have two that's opposite ends of the spectrum isn't it do you remember in the royal family which was by some margin one of my i mean it's just the best sitcom ever carolina was just a genius but when the mom i think anthony long-suffering door answerer and tea maker anthony has a vegetarian girlfriend who's coming round and the mum says, well, she can have, just wafer thin ham. It'll be fine.

So it crops up. It's a lovely scene as well in Gavin and Stacey, isn't it? Where the wonderful Alison Stedman does the same kind of thing. A little bit of chicken. Mini fillet. Well, because doesn't she decide to be vegetarian in solidarity? Oh, she lives't she decide to be vegetarian in solidarity

or she told them in a previous a previous meeting that she was a vegetarian and then she has to stick with it pepperoni in her face when no one's looking oh dear anyway gosh what a tangent from kelp no one's asking but. Do you remember the story of my agent's poor cat passing away and the poor cat snacks being sent to my Dora? Well, she's absolutely in dreamland. She is loving it. She's discovered these things called tasty sticks, which we'd never had before until Sue very kindly passed on.

Sadly, the snacks she doesn't need anymore. And Dora's having a tasty stick every night when we have our dinner. A little cat face properly lights up. She makes noises like somebody, I don't know, like me in the 70s when exposed to a sudden

sight of Donny Osmond I mean it's honestly off the scale. Gosh quite a disturbing image. Do you know what? Some neighbours down the road, when their dog very sadly died, they just gave us an enormous, great big kind of half-finished, 10-kilogram pack of dried dog food.

And just to this day, I don't know how I felt about that as a gift. No, it came from a place of wanting to help you out and also they probably didn't want to look at it anymore I know that it sat in the hall cupboard for a very very long time do you think it might still be there possibly yeah uh right so there's uh there's a very lovely email from Jo it's quite a long one do you want to delve into it? Well, this is about the conversation we had yesterday about whether or not you really need to have periods. We had a very eminent reproductive health specialist as our guest, didn't we? This is from Joe, who says, wanted to say thank you for that conversation about taking contraception long term.

I agonised about putting my daughter on the pill at the age of 14 due to her very heavy and wildly irregular periods that were, quite frankly, traumatic every time they appeared. After a couple of false starts, one inducing vomiting and the other one mild depression, we persevered and switched to the mini pill, which is progesterone only, and that was a lifesaver. Periods and all

the grief that accompanies them have gone. I cannot thank medical science enough and wish that it had been more widely discussed when I'd been her age and endured debilitating periods myself. It was really reassuring to hear that she can stay on this pill for as long as she wants. I can relax a little knowing that my decision to insist the doctors allow her access to the pill will hopefully not be an action that will adversely affect her future health. As a parent, you always want the best,

least painful pathway for your children, but we don't always know the long-term consequences of our own choices. Sounds like I might have done okay with this one. Today is her 18th birthday and one thing I do know is it's period free. Yeah and so she can go out and have a good time and not be worried and I do think that if you have if you have a child who's just having these just I mean they do really negatively impact your life and at precisely the time in your life when you're already

feeling self-conscious and sort of perpetually mortified about something you just don't want that danger of a really heavy period suddenly happening do you no it's alarming really really distressing and alarming um i love the fact that joe goes on to uh talk about her periods she's 50 and menopausal and says i've spent years believing i couldn't use hormonal contraception because of its links to breast cancer and we have that in the family I now understand this connection has been debunked and went straight onto the marina coil like Julia Bailey who was the doctor we spoke to yesterday and Jo says at long last I no longer have painful heavy erratic

periods myself and have been told this will help with the menopause symptoms and my choices of HRT. And, Jo, you say that the conversation we had with Dr Bailey was reassuring, and you are grateful for the open, honest and frank discussions that we're having on our new show. And that is music to our ears, actually, Jane, isn't it? Well, it is, and also we're really open to people suggesting ideas they would like us to talk about. Because I'm really glad that Jo has appreciated the fact that we can be quite frank

and that there are some discussions that are perhaps a little awkward to have in our real lives. But we don't care what we say on the radio, do we? We don't give a monkeys. No, we do give a monkeys. But we don't mind that it might be regarded by some other people as trivial or, quote, embarrassing. No, and we don't mind asking those questions which might sometimes need us to reveal a bit about ourselves

in order to either make the person we're talking to feel a bit more comfortable or just be informed about it. So we don't mind doing that. So, yes, please delve in. And if there's stuff that you think, oh, I've never heard that on the radio before, we might be the place that could give it a go. Yeah. So it's janeandfeeattimes.radio if you have an idea for one of those really open and frank conversations. And we certainly don't need to mention your name if we decide to follow the subject that you have suggested.

Sarah says, Jane and Fee, I do appreciate I can listen to your randomly endearing witterings more than once a week, but I am as a scouser conflicted that the Times is where I have to go to listen to you. As Jane will know, a certain paper is widely boycotted in the city and Sarah is referring to the Sun. That said, I have wrestled with my inner demons

and I have been enjoying the Off Air podcast. Sarah, I get it completely and I have been enjoying the off-air podcast Sarah I get it completely and I you know I totally understand what you're where you're coming from and what you're saying but I'm also really glad that you're here with us we both really appreciate it it's Wednesday so it's time for this this wellness Wednesday we're talking sea moss, which has been taking the health world by storm. Sea moss is nutrient-dense sea vegetable,

and it's said to be full of 92 minerals, which will increase energy levels and aid digestion. The so-called superfood can be added to tea, smoothies, everything can be added to a smoothie, and yoghurts, or even eaten straight from the jar. And we have some here, and we're going to try it. This has been supplied by the company

The Sea Moss Boss, and is sourced from the northwest of Ireland. T. McKen from The Sea Moss Boss, Moss Boss, impossible to say, joins us now. Hello, T. Hi, how are you? I'm very well.

I'm sorry that I can't say your company's name. Did you have to have a lot of practice yourself or are you word perfect on it all the time? No, no, I'm used to saying it now. It's easy. Yeah. Tell us a bit more about CMOS and what it is proven to be able to do for you. Okay, so CMOS is now sort of like a blanket term for an array of mosses out there. Ours particularly is Irish moss which is from Ireland. It's hand-picked and certified organic and the proven thing about sea moss is that there are loads of people that mention that it helps with digestion. It aids with their hair, skin and nails. It helps with thyroid function. And it's been taken in the Caribbean and in Ireland for centuries.

In Ireland, particularly, it was used as a cough and flu medicine because it reduces the length of time that you suffer from a cold or a flu. So basically those kind of viruses. What, this might be a really daft question, but what's, I've just had a taste tea. What is in the jar? I'm just looking at this. It says here Irish moss 70%, spring water rinsed with limes. So that's all that's in here, right? Okay.

Yeah, there's no preservatives or anything in there no okay now i'm going to try to describe it's got a consistency of slightly thick wallpaper paste hasn't it um and i mean i do i'm trying to be as honest as i possibly can about the consistency of it and i would describe the color as it's not unlike sort of stewed apple um something of that sort of nature perhaps slightly darker um and it tastes of almost nothing but it isn't i have to be really honest i was expecting it to taste perhaps a little bit seafaring i was i was thinking of a sort of how would i describe it a bit salty a bit so i wanted to taste the sea i expected to taste the sea. And I can't. Is it just me?

Well, no, it's actually we rinse it with lime specifically so you don't get that sea taste because a lot of people do get put off with the sea taste. Sorry, this is another dark question. Would that be salty then? Have you taken the salt out? question would that be salty then have you taken the salt out um with no salt has been taken out it has been soaked um so the salt is released um as it is soaked and then it's soaked with limes just to make sure that you don't get that salty sea taste because a lot of people do like to put it in their smoothies and yogurt and porridge um some people take it as it is which is why we've added the limes it just cuts away the smell and the sea taste to make it more palatable. Yeah, it's not it's not revolting in any way. I mean, I really do mean that it's not.

I mean, we're not talking I'm a celebrity, you know, revolting part of a great heffalump or anything like that. It's just not something I'd look forward to eating, if I'm really honest. Yeah, which is why a lot of people put it in their smoothies and the first thing they do i think people try um look past the the taste or the texture because they want to get the mineral benefits from it um so they take it as a natural supplement instead of taking additional supplements um in their diet so they literally just stick to the sea moss which is like one to two tablespoons a day and it's getting a lot of popularity now because a lot of people have expressed um how much it's helped them with certain elements that they may have um deficiency in certain

minerals i mean it's um it's sea moss is one of the um sea vegetables out there there's an array of them that have a lot of minerals that we should be taking. Are we just really just scratching the surface of what could be? Well, just loads of stuff in the sea, in the oceans that we could make use of and which might be really good for us. Yes, which is why we Seamoss Bus, for example, does a lot more than just Seamoss. I mean, our name is obviously Seamoss because that was originally our main focus until we saw the array of nutrient dense seed vegetables out there. And we decided to do that because of the fact that a lot of land vegetables are lacking the minerals that they used to have because the soil is not getting enough time to replenish, where there's an abundance of seaweeds out there that have all those minerals like B12. that have all those minerals like B12.

You've got your iron, magnesium, phosphorus, the things that we don't realise what we need for our body, for like bones and blood flow, which is why we go from dulse, sea spaghetti. We've got wakame and forms of kelp. Do you have to worry about the seas in which you're collecting these things from being polluted? Yes, which is why we suddenly only get our products from Ireland, because they are tested for the main heavy metals like arsenic and lead and mercury.

We wouldn't get anything in terms of like the English Channel because of, you know, the pollutants. It doesn't bear thinking about what's down there. We only make sure we get it from Ireland. It's tested six to eight months by the Irish Soil Association, Organic Association. So we make sure that we get the quality, the best. And it's sustainable. It's only picked what's there. It's left to mature.

So it's not overpicked. And do you have to dive to get it or is it something you can collect when the tide's out if you can collect it when the tide's out so literally it's picked off of the rocks um and nothing is overly farmed basically so it's literally picked off the rocks it's left to mature to get the minerals from the water and from the rug as well pretty interesting. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to give it a go for a couple of weeks, see if it makes a difference. Yes, you feel. We say at least take one to two tablespoons a day.

And then most people, the first thing they say, if you've got a lot of mucus in your system, that's the first thing that starts to bring it up. And then you get energy levels after that. But we recommend taking it between two or three weeks as a minimum. Lovely. I'll give it a go. I'll keep everybody posted on my mucus. T, it's lovely to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed for joining us this afternoon. Do you want to have another go at saying that she's the co-owner of CMOS Boss? The CMOS Boss. T. McKen and CMOS is available now. is available now. We had a cracking guest today, Anne-Marie Imafidan.

She's a pioneer in the world of tech and founder of Stemettes, which is a social enterprise that gets girls to do STEM subjects and also thrive at them. Now, she was the youngest ever girl to pass A-level computing. Can you remember how old she was, Jane? She was 11. She was 11 when she got an A-level in computing. And at 13, she was offered a scholarship to John Hopkins University in America. By 17, she was doing a master's at Oxford and many boardrooms later and an MBE and a hugely successful podcast she did find herself on a Wednesday afternoon talking to us so I was fascinated with the world around me and for me the fascination was always how does it work I was I was obsessed with that whether it was the

washing machine at home or the VCR player I don't know if you you remember that that there we go right and we have the cassette tapes and you'd have the vcr player and you'd have like a big box tv on the other side of the living room and it'd be like how did it know timon and pumba or any other you know great children's uh movies that are available how did it know how to play the images in the same order you know that i can't see on the. I can't see it in the cassette tape. And so I was obsessed with all of these kinds of things and the logic of how they all work together. But you actually took your VCR apart, didn't you, Anne-Marie?

I did. And I'm thankful every day that my dad didn't kill me for doing that. But I think because I know what I'm like with my devices now. But yeah, for me, it was how does that work? OK, cool. Now I've understood that and seen a little bit more about it. What can I do with that knowledge? What other problems can I solve now that I know how that particular thing works? So that's always been my MO, really. And that's something that's stuck with me even into adulthood.

When do you think you first realised that there was a gender slant around all of the STEM subjects? And, you know, you weren't on the kind of the side of the rising tide? So it was fairly late on, actually, later than you'd imagine. Given I had the childhood that you mentioned, this kind of underkin child prodigy thing, I'd never, I didn't really notice the gender thing until the end of 2012 actually so it's almost it's a 10 10 years ago um where I ended up at a conference in the states that was for specifically for women in competing um and I was there and there were three and a half thousand plus technical women all under one roof talking technology coexisting breathing the same air using the same loos but you know really really talking

technology and it was such a such a bizarre moment for me, because I'd never noticed up until that point, it'd never been overt, it'd never been obvious, it'd never been so strikingly in my face that I'm never in scenarios like this. I'm never, you know, within a majority of women, I'm often the only. And sometimes you have to be in those kind of scenarios to be able to reflect back and think, yeah, you know, at work work if anyone walked past any of my meetings they'd have seen me and immediately spotted the odd one out as the youngest the blackest and the femalest in the room and so for me that was it was being there it was like wow okay cool this is what it looks like this is what I'm missing um what can we what can we do about it um and so yeah it was about about 10 years ago

actually now um you do talk in the book and i know i've heard you speak before about gatekeepers and gatekeeping and this notion that some men not all men as we've got to always be careful to say want to keep this world for themselves or do too many women i include myself here do too many women, I include myself here, do too many women allow them to keep it that way? So I think there's kind of two sides to it. And I think, you know, when we talk about gatekeepers, you know, a lot of this is about power, right? A lot of this is about, you know, this is information that I have, and I'm able to use this information to gain something in order to influence things in a particular way, in order to do things that I would like to do and do that successfully. And so I think with a lot of the

gatekeeping, there is a huge part of it that there is a majority. There are folks who believe that they have the birthright to be the successful ones in this space. They have the birthright to be the ones that know what they're talking about in this space. And they've been fed that from lots of different places, right? From the fed that from lots of different places right from the people that they inherited the space from from the stories that we tell in the papers the stories that we tell of technologists the representations that we see in tv and in movies so i think there's there's things like that that play into it but there is also then the stories that we sometimes tell ourselves as women right the stories that we've been told all the again and again the things

that we've heard from peers the things that sometimes we say to each other, the things that we may have heard, you know, this, oh, I don't do maths, right? It's something that people say quite a lot. And so then that ends up being internalized. So there's an element of it that's internalized. There's also active gatekeeping, people who, you know, decide that they do not, you know, deem women good enough for promotion in their organizations or good enough to join their technical teams or, you know, that, you know, we run STEMETS, as you mentioned at the top. And, you know, we still hear girls being told, you know, they turn up for open day at particular university to go and hear from the engineering department about what's on offer. And they're told, no, no, nursing is over there. And so this is something we have again and again and again at all levels throughout the industry, all levels across the field of active gatekeeping and also more passive, perhaps, gatekeeping in the norms of who we assume does the

technology, who we assume has a lot of value to add to technical conversations. And can you just give us a couple of practical examples of why it matters that women are involved in tech all the way through from coding to actually using the products? So it matters because if we are not part of the assumptions or not part of the thinking around this technology, then it's built in a way that, you know, doesn't serve us and often can harm us. And there'll be, there's lots of examples that we have over years, whether it's voice recognition technology that we've been working on for decades, and that actually, you know, still struggles sometimes to pick up female voices. Women's voices are slightly different from

men's voices. I mean, this is also beyond gender, right? There are Scottish women and Irish women who particular voice assistants don't understand because of their accents. And we have to think, you know, who preceded who? Who came first, the voice recognition technology or Scottish women, right? And how was that not something that was considered so that now they can't talk to their cars

in the way that other people can? Sticking with cars, I'm sure you'll have, readers will be familiar with Caroline Corrado-Perez and Invisible Women. And even the idea of a seatbelt that we still have in 2022 are safety standards

based on 50th percentile men, 50th percentile male. There are some people that are 98th percentile. Some people are second percentile men. There are some people who aren't men. And so therefore, we've built something that means that I possibly may have never used a seatbelt correctly in my life because I'm not a 50 percentile man. I don't have the height, the weight, the weight

distribution of them. But I think even more so, you know, in the book, I talk about financial examples when we look at credit cards limits and how if you have two people in a heterosexual marriage that are together and have combined their finances, you still end up seeing the credit limits of women much lower than those of men, even though they're paying from the same pool. And so this is going to continue to propagate, continue to roll forward as technology. It's not going anywhere. And so the decisions that it's making on our lives, whether it's financial, whether it's at play, whether it's at work. We had another example in the book, and I'm a trustee at the Institute for the Future of Work. But this idea of using technology to help help with hiring decisions.

And there was one company in particular that we looked at who ended up using an algorithm to help them make hiring decisions that was based on who had been successful in that organization up until that point and guess what no women were part of that definition of success and so none of them were selected by the algorithm to be hired for this role and so there's all of these things that end up coming through across all of what womanhood is the fact that we exist and who has predated who us all the technology but, but to forget that, I don't know, menopause, periods, pregnancy exists when you're building health technology is not really going to serve anybody and might actually end up and has actually ended up causing harm. And so it's really, really important to ensure that we're in the room asking those questions, challenging those assumptions, and of course, creating and coding and project managing and, you know, product managing and

doing all of the other things along with that. There's so much positivity in your book, which I think we should probably try and head towards because otherwise we might cry. And that's just an assessment of the reality of the world that we're living in, Anne-Marie. But I love the fact that you have these kind of go-to sections where you can just give a little bit of advice in what can be just such a confusing world. One thing that I really liked was this very simple thing in the chapter Getting Started, where you tell people to try and develop the habit of carving out 10 minutes each week to watch something technology related on YouTube YouTube or a platform of your choosing and just take in what you're watching.

Think about how it applies to what you're doing at home, at work and with friends and be infectious with that newfound knowledge. And I'll tell you why I liked it so much. It's just I think, and I don't want to automatically include Jane in this, but I suspect she comes from the same kind of place. I think I am so far behind sometimes in this, but I suspect she comes from the same kind of place. I think I am so far behind

sometimes in this new world that I've left it too late to catch up with anything. So I'm always just on the receiving end of things. I'm never very proactive about learning because I think I'm a bit too old to learn. I think that's shared by lots of people. And I think it's a funny one, because again, when we talk about gatekeepers, especially with something like tech, you can feel a bit like, yeah, you've missed the boat. There's nothing new to be learned. They knew all of it. They've known all of it. And, you know, forevermore, they shall know all of it. Whereas that's not really what technology is about. Like technology is constantly changing. And so the idea that someone knows everything and that's it and that's the done deal and it's kind of you know set in stone quite literally like that we don't have that

stone in the technology and so it's never too late to get involved because all of us are almost on a on a on a treadmill where there's always something new coming up there's always something that's happening there's always a new version you know folks will know this there are many apps that are really really popular none of which I'll, but may have been featured in the ads on the show already, that there's a new version every two weeks. And so there's always something new. There's always something that they've got to add. There's almost something that they've forgotten, right? Or there's a new progression. And so for you, you're just jumping in, right? You're just coming in at this point. You're like, okay, cool. This is the juncture which I'm joining this river. And I'm

going to head in the same and flow in the same direction. And so that's the approach that you have to take, because that is literally the name of the game. That is what the technology is all about. We haven't got close, have we, to 100% of the global population being online. Do you think we'll ever get there? And would it be a good thing if we did? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we will ever get there. And I think that's because of the nature of human beings. You know, what is universal other than what we have kind of biologically in terms of breathing in and breathing out? So I wonder if it is something that we will universally get there on.

I think there's also kind of access to resources. At the moment, it's still there's still costs involved in being a part of the infrastructure, as there are costs involved in having running water and costs involved in having electricity. And so, you know, if we haven't got to everyone having running water or clean water, you know, should online really be on that list? But whether it's a goal, I think really does depend on who is driving that, you know, what are we asking folks to be online for? What are the harms the checks and the balances what are the upsides and the progress that can be done and how much agency are we really giving them with that access to online which i think there are several attempts

that people have made to allow everybody to be online but you know if you have too many ulterior motives you're not altruistic enough with it and you're not thinking about the power imbalance in the way that you're enabling it then it possibly isn't a good thing right if you're not thinking about the power imbalance in the way that you're enabling it, then it possibly isn't a good thing, right? If you're giving people online access and they can only access one website, I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing. And a lot of attempts have centred on things like that. What did you think of yesterday's online harms bill? And do you consider it to be watered down?

So I think that there's a lot of lobbying that has gone on in the background. There's a lot of kind of contentious elements that have been added. There's a lot that's going on kind of culturally as well that has changed since the initial time that it was tabled. So I think it has been watered down. I think that was expected by a lot of folks. I'd know that there's also a lot of movement in kind of what the eu is doing versus the the point that we're trying to prove without getting too political um with our you can be political i don't want to be oh okay i mean i so i think i think it has been watered down but i think um i'm i'm hoping and it looks like it's not this isn't, there's not a finality, I guess, in this, there's still edits for us to do, it's movement in a direction, but the work continues, and there

are fantastic people like Shea Akowere at Glitch UK, who's really, really leading the charge, actually, on ensuring that we can have the right kind of online safety, with the right kind of accountability for folks, and that's individuals well as organized as well as companies and organizations so could could do better but i'm i'm hopeful uh yet for for change and for the right kind of progress and maybe dialing up of some of the things that have been dialed down and marie give us the benefit of your expertise what is coming down the track in tech that we may not yet be aware of and i mean by coming down the track I mean we'll be part of our daily life in three or four years time oh um I don't want to scare anybody there's a there's a lot of interesting things that are coming down the track there's a lot of work that's being done on kind of storage

and where biology meets technology and being able to store information on on strands of DNA that I think is always kind of alarming but also interesting to be able to store information on strands of DNA that I think is always kind of alarming but also interesting to be able to read and understand and try and get my head around. There's other work that folks are doing on mobility and travel and kind of the engineering that we have of not quite cars but that being able to move from one space to another at really short distances. There is, am i am i reading about at the moment um some core bits on uh on on recognition actually uh that may be slightly less cool actually this isn't cool but uh we're talking quite a lot about facial recognition at the moment

there are folks who are working on heart print recognition and being able to do that at distance. Yeah. And identify folks from because everybody's the same as you've got kind of a unique set of thumbprints and your face is in some ways unique. The same is true of the heart. So sorry. You could recognize me from one of my internal organs. Yeah. From the print of your heartbeat, because that can be read at distance. I mean, I went to talk, funny enough, at the same conference 10 years ago about nose prints and the fact that you could you could actually do touch ID with your nose which we all found hilarious. Was that pre-pandemic? But yeah there's lots of weird and wonderful things that folks are working on. I think for me, the excitement isn't necessarily in the technology in itself.

It's in the use case. That was the hugely impressive Dr. Anne-Marie Imafoden. Really good to talk to her and just fantastic to have just some of our worries about tech slightly debunked, although she was very honest about the future holding some for me anyway some slightly surprising aspects um i think she's always very keen to point out it's not so much the technology as who's controlling the technology that's really really significant and we didn't have time to ask her as well just i still and i think probably to my dying day will never understand how a 3D printer could make, say, a plastic lobster. Just never going to understand it, Jane.

I wonder whether we could get her back on, just because I agree with you. I don't get 3D printing. And I know there's talk about prosthetic limbs being made by 3D printers. Guns. Guns. Guns. I mean, I don't be happy, obviously obviously if we lived in a world where no gun was ever made by anything but it's i know i just i mean look you know the struggles i've had with

my printer well i do i mean we don't that's what i worry about jane because i think when the 3d printer becomes a truly domestic item i don't want to see what it is that you make i will not be getting one it won't work i know No, I can't print out an email. So I think the danger of me creating some sort of destructive device via a 3D printer, you've got lots to worry about, but you can park that concern. Yes, that's very true. You've got to go to a school play.

I certainly do. Don't keep me waiting because I really, really, really have to get an aisle seat. Is that so you can leave early? No, it's just a thing. It's just a thing. I want to be really, really comfortable to see one of the offspring. Not on stage, actually, doing some backstage stuff. But I don't want to be right in the middle of one of those small benches. Yes, it is, I think, probably quite significant that in lots of media show-off families

that the urge to perform tends to skip a generation. My youngsters couldn't get further away from a stage if their life depended upon it, and they are, frankly, really just mortified by both their parents' desire to perform. Jane, being the giving parent I am, that's the only reason why I'm here doing this, really, just to make it much better for them.

Oh, you are wonderful, darling. Now, tomorrow, who have we got on the show and possibly this podcast as well? Oh, Michael and Hilary Whitehall, who are the parents of Jack Whitehall, and he did a successful thing, so his dad did a successful thing and his mum's joined in the successful thing.

And actually, that disproves the point, doesn't it? That's just an almighty showbiz. God almighty. Another of my mad theories, or what I thought were sensible theories, utterly debunked in the next sentence. Don't worry, print yourself a new one tomorrow. I will do.

Have a good evening. you have been listening to off air with jane garvey and fee glover our times radio producer is rosie cutler and the podcast executive producer is ben mitchell now you can listen to us on the free times radio app or you can download every episode from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this, but live, then you can, Monday to Thursday, 3 till 5 on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye.