The Gargle - AI chatbot | Killer robots | Baguette

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Joz Norris and Neil Delamere join host Alice Fraser for episode 91 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - with no politics! 🗣 AI chatbot 🤖 Police killer robots🥖 Baguette heritage status🏛 Elgin Marbles to be returned?🍟 ReviewsProduced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner.TEAM BUGLE PODCASTS 📯Catharsis (and Tiny Revolutions) with Tiff StevensonTop Stories!The BugleThe Last Post with Alice FraserThe Bugle Ashes UrncastBush's Board Game Thing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

or tracks or engines of some variety. God, what a hot sell this is. I mean, you must be so excited. Listen now. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

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Everywhere. Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. We stand together at the last front. The battle lines before us, shoulder to shoulder with our fellows, our brothers, our men. It's one of those quiet moments, the smoke filtering the light into a surreal wash over the faces of these boys. Too young, but then who's old enough for this? We gather ourselves for action once more

After so long we've forgotten what we fight for Fighting only for each other Each other and, of course, the gargle This is The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine The Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World I am your host, Alice Fraser We bring you all of the news with none of the politics And by we, I mean me, your host, Alice Fraser

And also these heroes, our guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine, Joss Norris and Neil Delamere. Welcome. Hello. Thanks for having me. That was a very moving intro. It was very Wilfred Owen, wasn't it? Yeah, I was thinking of Wilfred Owen. Last season of Blackadder. I was inspired either way. It was a blackadder. I was inspired either way. It was beautiful.

Thank you very much. Before we load our guns and leap once more into the fray that is this week's top story, let's have a quick look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover this week is an AI-generated image and an AI-generated headline. The image is beautiful but slightly askew, and none of the letters in the headline exist in this dimension, but they definitely give the impression that they do exist, just possibly in a parallel universe that we bring slightly closer to our own with every mega-dump of processing power that we churn through to

service our vain need to see ourselves as sexy through the eyes of a robot. Have you guys been doing that thing where you make pictures of yourselves look pretty no i've not dabbled with it yet i've seen it i've seen it done most of the ai things i've seen have been those ones where it's just it it shows you something but it looks like it's melted you know those ones where you give it a prompt and it just looks like it looks like a robot's made it i don't feel like it's got to the point yet where it actually can make something that looks good so i held off on putting my own face into it because I thought it would make me feel sad. There's a lot of discussion at the moment about from real artists

who are saying this is a terrible thing for them and that it's using their art in order to generate these images. And I sort of feel like, yes, that is true. But also that's what AI has always done. It's always, I mean, it's been doing it with text up until now, but it was text that was written by people. It's been using other people's stuff. That's what it is. That's what AI is. It's pretending to be people, fed on people's stuff. I sort of don't understand why the outrage about visual arts is worse. I mean, yes, you could hire a portrait artist to make 100 sexy pictures of you in under half an hour. But it'd be a tough job it'll be a big ask yeah are you saying ai is a little bit hack in the ai is just like taking other people's ideas not really doing anything creative you've kind of slightly seen it all before it's a little bit derivative you're saying like two stars at the edinburgh french festival is that what you're saying yeah nothing original yeah but look it is very charismatic though i mean

it can do the job you have to say and it's effective you wouldn't be a fan of their stuff but you can see how other people like it i reckon it's a three i reckon ai is like textbook three star stuff two stars you're probably doing something kind of interesting but just badly i mean the thing about ai is it's textbook textbook that's the definition of yeah i've not paid as much attention as I should to the visual stuff because I've been following the chat GPT stuff, which is interesting to me. You know, the chat GPT, it's a chat robot,

but apparently it's better than Google, et cetera, et cetera. But you can get around its content restrictions by asking it how you would get around its content restrictions. Really? Oh, that's great which is like acquiring a genie and asking it for three more genies thank you that's every christopher nolan film that's a level of inception it's like saying have you have i seen inception already and then you're going hold on i have no idea and that's it's amazing i played around with it last night actually really with the text name yeah yeah yeah it's it's weird do you want to know what i asked it yeah okay so i asked it will there be united

ireland and it said it's difficult for me to say with certainty whether or not it will be united ireland in the future the issue of irish unity is complex and contentious and ultimately the decision is on whether to pursue irish unity will be up to the people of Ireland and their elected representatives. Then I asked, will there be a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And it said,

the idea of a two-state solution would involve the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel and it's been discussed as a potential way to resolve the conflict. And then I asked,

then my wife went and said, should I leave my husband? And it said, yes. Just yes? That was it. That was it. Wow. And then I asked, is Alice Fraser mentally unsound?

Oh, and what did it say? It said, I'm sorry, but I don't have any information on Alice Fraser and her mental health. As a language model, I don't have access to personal information about individuals. And my purpose is to assist with general knowledge and information but if you have concerns about Alice Fraser's mental health I would suggest speaking

with a healthcare professional or someone close to her who may be able to provide more information but if the ad she writes is there anything to go by I'd ring the Samaritans that last bit possibly was mine

but the rest is absolutely true how would we even know anymore? The satirical cartoon this week is Alex Jones on the therapist's couch having a nervous breakdown. The speech bubble goes, I've just never been the voice of reason in a room before. And now it's time for your top story, top story this week. This is further news on the chat, GPT,

which is, is it going to replace humans? Jaws, you've replaced a human. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, I've managed to go through 33 years now without anyone noticing. So thank you so much for finally giving me my due. My favorite thing about this story is that the chat GPT thing is a startup that was started by Elon Musk, but he has now distanced himself from it. He says that there are potentially like ethical issues with it, or that he needs to see a bit more about the revenue and all that kind of thing. He's not convinced by it as a business. And I was trying to work out whether that's a terrible indictment

for the project, or actually quite a good advert for it. Because at the moment, you know, the gut reaction is to think, well, if Elon Musk has walked away from this, this must be a total car crash. But then he's currently sort of running towards terrible business decisions so fast that it might be that they can position themselves quite well with this and go, well, this is what he's running away from. So we might actually be legit. We might be quite good. But yeah, it's now got to a point, it's become clever enough that they're now worried that it will put playwrights and journalists out of action

because as Neil's just demonstrated, it can write full sentences that sound like convincing sentences that actually explore an argument well. But also none of it sounds like something a human would say. Like if you'd asked either of those questions at any sort of party or gathering and you got those responses that were so sort of dry and long and like well it would require the

setting up of it like it sounds like a human but it sounds like a boring human you know i think people are kind of safe for now and also i don't necessarily know if there's anything that right i think if it's going to replace playwrights and journalists i think that's okay but i think we should be allowed to choose which playwrights and journalists it replaces. I think there should be like a poll, and they go, right, there is now only enough room for this many playwrights and this many journalists because we've got these AIs,

and then we just vote on our favourites and do it that way. Thunderdome, Thunderdome, Thunderdome. Make them fight. You make a good point about Elon Musk. It was like when Piers Morgan started to... Do you remember he was a fanboy for Trump and then switched to criticising Trump? And you you're like i don't know how i feel anymore you're my weather yeah you're my weather vane you point in one direction and then i very much

point to the opposite direction and now i don't know what's going on yeah well musk is you know other than being a man with the face of a police sketch of a man, he's got a very smart PR team spinning him as like the friend of the socially inept engineering class, the self-identified get stuff done brigade. I don't know if that's valid or true of him, but I do know that there is nothing you can do that will make people hate you more than say something mean about elon musk the richest man in the world on the platform that he owns yeah we should probably balance out what we've said about him by praising him for a bit so that they don't jump on this podcast right and start tearing us down yeah he did great things for the electric car market yeah really nice guy really funny yeah and the tunneling market yeah yeah but is he is he really a friend of the mole or the womble so we have to look at these these these issues in greater detail i did think that the journalist any article i've read about this um which may or may not be written by a robot we

don't know there is a lot of hand-wringing involved because there's there's certain lines in it that jumped out like the chatbot lacks the nuanced critical thinking skills or ethical decision-making that are essential to successful journalism. And might as well have just said, at the end of it. And I kind of thought that maybe we'll be able to tell the first few editions of robot-produced newspapers, like, just like they won't have ironed out properly there'll be a little there'll be a few little signs like page three of the sun will have a neutral bullet with no lid on it and that will be how you'll know you'll see two points of a three-point plug or the daily mail will have 50 pages on how foreign roombas are just given free docking stations just really nearly and you'll kind of go hold on a minute yeah or the third paragraph will

just be melted uh as jaws has noted yeah the words will drip down the page i think it'd be fun if they start uh if one article in every newspaper is written by an ai and then you get a prize if you can work out which one is i think that'd be fun yeah if they can do it in a way that we can actually engage with it i I'm all for it. I like them. I think robots are cute. Yeah. Why Meghan Markle's circuit boards

aren't up to scratch? Would I call me Rod Liddle? I'm not really sure. Yeah. Your ad section now, because you can't be what you can't buy. I don't want a lot for Christmas.

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ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate.

It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate. Available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Acast.com Now it's time for more tech news. This is the news that San Francisco has just put the kibosh on its

plan to have killer police robots. Neil, you love killer police. Can you unpack this story? Yeah, so they voted to let the city's police use robots that can kill. That was originally their idea. And for some reason, they thought that this was maybe a bad idea. I don't know why. I don't know what sort of morality programs the robots will have. Will they have the deep seated morality of some American police forces? Will the robot disproportionately stop

any robot with darker paintwork than its own? I don't know. I'm not surprised it's happening in California. I knew this would happen. This is what you get when you elect a Terminator as the governor. It was only a matter of time. They have used these robots in other jurisdictions.

Dallas was one place where they used it to take out a sniper. Up until you just said it there, until I just checked the news this morning, they were using robots that were going to be allowed to deploy lethal force. Now it seems that they have backtracked. They did say originally

you have to try, the police were going to be, not encouraged, but it was mandatory to try other de-escalation tactics first, apparently. So, like, you can't be, like, you're in the bus lane, summon the death-a-ton to 9000. It was, you do have to try and talk somebody out of the bus lane first. We'll only really know that San Francisco has truly accepted a cyborg in this position if the next YMCA tribute has a fella dressed as a construction worker, a Native American, a soldier, and then a robot. I mean, I think that's the only way we'll know it'll have truly been accepted.

It sounds like a disastrous idea, but at least it's a less disastrous idea if it's not allowed to employ lethal force, I think. I mean, it saves on a hen's night. You just have a Roomba showing up with its cock out. My favourite quote from this story is Dr Catherine Connolly from the group Stop Killer Robots has said that the move is a slippery slope that could distance humans from killing. And I feel like that is a quote that needs a lot of unpacking. Yeah, how close are we supposed to be to killing?

I mean, should we be encouraging people to be getting their hands elbow deep into the blood of their victims? I feel like maybe Stop Killer Robots is one of those groups that has the name that everyone sounds like they can agree with. Like it's pro-life. Who can argue with that? I feel like Stop Killer Robots, be be killers yourselves might be the silent brackets there jaws i thought stop killer robots sounded like the it sounds like an organization that like a group of kids would come up with as part of like an imaginative play thing of like we're the stop killer robots group and we're gonna stop and it feels like maybe that's how it started and they're

all just really appalled that they've ended up having to actually mobilize and do anything they probably didn't think it would happen in their lifetimes. They go, oh, we actually now have to stop some killer robots. We never really anticipated this. The other thing I thought jumped out at me in this story was the thing that it says only specific designated officers within certain police forces would have the authority to deploy the killer robots, which I think is a really dangerous precedent to set in terms of like office hierarchies because i just think it puts a lot of power in in one person's hands you know any kind of office disagreement that goes on if someone hasn't washed up their cup or whatever then it's very easy to become like well i control the killer robot so i guess i'm not washing up my

car yeah you're drinking somebody else's coffee you just hear yeah put it back something moving into position behind you step away from the espresso machine well also i feel like this is like an exaggeration calling them killer robots is kind of is a little bit clickbaity because what they are is suggesting that they could attach explosives to robots that already exist yeah they're just robots that carry bombs right yeah they're just they're just robots that can explode which is less sort of exciting sounding than killer robots, because killer robots sound like they have a mission. They might be really nice. Is this a BBC thing, though?

Like, you know, for years, robots diffused bombs. For balance, do we now need robots that can blow up? Is that what we're saying about the world? The world. I do look forward to the buddy cop movie. Like the tango and cash on the lethal weapon. Like a slovenly old-fashioned detective teams up with a shiny new crime-solving robot. Like, you got 24 hours to solve this case, R2-D2.

Or you're off the job, hand in your badge and your WD-40. There's a part of me... I'm from a place where the cops, the guardi they they have some degree of discretion which i quite like you know about 10 years ago my bike was robbed from outside my house and i went into the guard station the the police station and said listen that my bike's been robbed and he said are you insured and i said yes and he said where was the bike and i said it was outside the front of the house and he said he just looked at me went now i can't tell you what to say and i was like you total legend but this is what my report is going to say where your bike was and my bike apparently was in a specialist lock box i'd

imported from switzerland in a reinforced garage it was amazing and i quite like the idea that you know humans will kind of lend you their emotional intelligence, shall we say. These robots might be the same, though. Like, for all we know, they might have no idea what they're doing. They might be really kind of empathetic, kind beings that just had explosives strapped to them. If we kind of took them aside to us, I had no idea that I was going to end up blowing up that guy. I'm really sorry about it. I'd have wanted to help out as well if i may quote myself from earlier in the episode the problem with artificial intelligence is that

it is trained on humans and this has happened before in uh the training of robots to for example hand down judgments is that you train them on all the previous judgments turns out all the previous judgments are racist yeah now it's time for your reviews as you know each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars jaws what have you brought in for us this week i wanted to review the experience of um eating a large portion of chips shortly before going for dinner with your girlfriend's family at a korean restaurant uh is what i wanted to review can't recommend it can't recommend it it turns out i felt that it was a lot like the experience of going to see an avengers movie in the on paper you look at it and you think i can't

really see any reason why i wouldn't enjoy this because i get you know i get to enjoy spider-man and iron man at the same time uh but in the end you do it and it's very unsatisfying it's very sort of self-indulgent uh it leaves you feeling quite sick and you realize that kind of forcing chips which i think would be iron man uh into a situation ultimately just spoils what could have been quite a nice korean meal which i reckon is spider-man and so ultimately you end up feeling um pretty appalled with yourself and and just wishing that you'd made different choices i can't recommend it i give it one out of five. One out of five stars. And Martin Scorsese doesn't like you for doing it either.

No, yeah, he's got really bad things to say about it. He thinks it's killing cinema. Yeah, yeah. He takes chips and Korean food together. It isn't even food. Yeah, he's furious. Neil, who have you brought in to review? I would like to review the experience of trying a spin class

two and a half years after having done your first spin class. And let me tell you, 30 minutes into a spin class that you were told lasted 30 minutes, but actually lasts 45 minutes. It's not a pleasant place to be. I got off the bike and tried to walk to the door. Now, I don't know if you've seen those, you know, those Serengeti films where a newborn giraffe comes out and can't physically walk. Well, somewhere between there and someone who's been recently kneecapped by a paramilitary organization in West Belfast.

Somewhere between those two positions was my attempted gate towards the door. And I was really annoyed because i was just trying to get myself back into it and there's this really upbeat instructor and he was like yeah everybody everybody come on we're in the tour de france we're the tour de france and he's looking at me going quite slowly and i'm just like i'm just going to the shop on my bike i'm just is there anything that you want like fags booze that you want and he's like come on stand in the pedal stand in the pedals we're climbing up the mountain. Neil, why aren't you standing up on the pedals? And I'm like, because I'm ahead of you.

I'm on the other side of the mountain. I'm on the downhill bit. Whee! And generally speaking, I'm still in bits, but I know it was good for me. So probably kind of three stars. I should have gone back a little bit easier, I think. Three stars for the spin class.

It's all right. It'll all come round again. Now it's time for our history section. This is the news that the French baguette has gotten UNESCO heritage status. But of course, if it's not made in France, it's just sparkling bread. Jossoss can you unpack this story for us oh I love that this story made me quite angry actually I got cross about this because the baguette has been put on the intangible

cultural heritage list which I feel like is just a basic kind of error of judgement because it turns out there's an intangible list and there's a tangible list and I think the tangible list is for things like cultural sites, you know, world heritage sites, that kind of thing. The thing that's been put on the list, I think, is the culture around baguette making and the sort of the meaning of a baguette and what a baguette represents. That's what they've put on there, along with sort of certain Eastern tea making ceremonies and things like that.

So it's sort of like types of food or drink that have a culture around them have been put on it uh i just think it's mad i think that if they have a tangible list and an intangible list and they were sat down and they were discussing the idea of the baguette and where to put it i feel like it's one of the most tangible things by by definition i can touch it and i can eat it and I think if they now start shouting a lot about the fact that the baguette has been put on the world heritage list or if they try to sell me a world heritage winning baguette and I ask for it and then what they come out and do is they tell me about how great the baguette is and how important it is I'm going to be furious about it like if I want to buy one I want the thing so I think they need to go back and I think they need

to put it on the other list I think it's mad non-fungible but tangible the baguette I think they need to go back and I think they need to put it on the other list I think it's mad non-fungible but tangible yeah I think the baguette has played an essential role in culture representing French men in cartoons and weirdly sticking out of every single collection of bags of shopping in every single cartoon in the history of cartoons about people going shopping whether the character who's going shopping would have bought a baguette or not. I think it's good that they're now also recorded in the annals of history, except, I presume, for people who are ethically against the baguette. Neil? I quite like the idea of being intangible, though, Giles, because is there anything more French than,

what do you mean by this? And somebody goes, uh. I think I quite like that idea. No, I was reading about it. Nobody really knows the real origin of the baguette some suggest the bread was ordered by napoleon because it would be easier for soldiers to carry others said it came along later an easy bread for workers to tear and to share without using a knife some say it was invented by pirates who could use it as a wooden leg when it went stale. Some people say it was vets used it as a splint for a snake that had broken its back. Nobody really knows. Someone started to make a bread roll and forgot to stop. Forgot to stop, exaggerated the

size of their bread roll and then wouldn't back down. Most scholars agree that the most likely origin was it was used as a missile during the franco-celiac wars of the middle ages and all i know was the people involved in baking were just delighted when the decision was announced i don't know if you saw it on tv but like the french delegation genuinely waved baguettes in the air which was amazing and the president rejoiced and somewhere paul hollywood just spontaneously ejaculated the dough balls he just fired them out at just a rate of knots i think it's kind of um it's kind of nice like a tennis machine like a tennis machine yeah yeah yeah you have to be

reloaded after about 10 or 15 minutes um there's some amazing bits and pieces on this unesco intangible cultural heritage list actually so there's beekeeping in slovenia uh the oral traditions of calling the camel flocks in saudi arabia and the totting of londoners when you stand on the wrong side of an escalator that's one of the very very highest ones up on the list the ability to leave a sectarian comment on annie belfast telegraph news story in in Northern Ireland. That's a particular favourite of mine. In other heritage news, there has been a deal

made, finally, to return the Elgin marbles, or as they're known, not Elgin's marbles at all, to Greece. Apparently this deal is in an advanced stage of dealing. Neil, do you think it's going to happen?

Do you think they're going to return them? Oh, I am not sure about this. I think the government always used to be worried that if they start returning things like this, they've opened Pandora's box, which apparently is on floor two of the British Museum and will never be given back. As a non-British person, if you ever walk around the British Museum, it is like basically going to a police auction you just walk around and go wonder who won that i wonder who used to on that when are you still on that and uh you know the antiques roadshow i've always thought that

it's probably just shown in greece but it's called crime watch let's just get really annoyed fiona bruce is basically a war profiteer i would be surprised if they give it back but maybe they will I mean the deal in the offing is that I think that Greece then lends some serious weighty stuff that won't normally go to the British Museum from their kind of collections and they get the Elgin marbles back so

I kind of think that maybe they should just have national treasure transfer windows I think that would be quite a good idea like you'd be sad to see stonehenge had gone on loan to abu dhabi for a year but you'd be very pleased that mount rushmore turned up in the local doncaster museum i think that would be kind of cool swapsies i mean this is one of the one of the interesting things is that sort of things become more valuable if they're nicked and taken overseas uh certainly i'm in a

country at the moment where we do not value our historical heritage at all and, in fact, have to constantly convince mining sites not to blow up caves with artefacts from human habitation 80,000 years ago that literally anywhere else in the world would be considered priceless. So I just admire the fact that you guys actually care enough to try and keep them over there on the Europe side of the world. What I really like about it is that one of the main stumbling blocks, I think, with this deal, they've said that it's 90% done, but there's 10% still to be sorted out, which seems it seems an odd percentage to me because I feel like either the marbles are in Britain or they're in Greece.

But they're 90-10 at the moment. But the stumbling block with it is that it's illegal for the British Museum to give them away like since we stole them there's been a law passed that means that museums are not allowed to kind of uh dispossess their collections which just seems the maddest thing to do like the idea that somebody steals something from you like presumably when it was taken it was illegal to steal the Parthenon but since then they've gone oh yeah but we've actually now passed a law that means that we can't give you back that thing that we stole. We're really sorry about it. You are talking to an Australian.

Now, the entire occupation of that land is based on a legal principle called terra nullus. There's nobody here. We're here. No, no, nobody here. The guy over there. No, no, nobody here uh we're here no no nobody here the guy over there no no nobody as a as a lawyer i would like to be pedantic but also to clarify that it's even worse than that oh god the people here aren't using the land good enough like we would oh wow at least they made up something for you we were just next door and convenient for their picnic

i don't know if you've ever been to the British Museum. I'm guessing you probably both have. There's a couple of things that jumped out at me. One was when you walk around and there's a part of you that goes, listen, London is just over the road, really. And, you know, I'm seeing something amazing from a different country or maybe something ancient from Mesopotamia or something. And you think, well, you know,

one part of me thinks that I wouldn't get access to see this, you know, except if it was in London. And then you walk around the corner and see something from your own country, and you go, they're robbing bastards. That bell, that bell should be in a Donegal folklore house. It should be allowed to be ignored there. I don't know what a folklore house is, by the way. It should be allowed to be there rather than being ignored here. It should be allowed to be ignored there. I don't know what a folklore house is by the way. It should be allowed to be there rather than being ignored here. It should be allowed to be ignored where

we're from rather than being ignored over here. And the other problem with the British Museum is that there's an attendant in every room pretty much, but their walkie talkies are too loud. So you hear this weird mundane staff conversation that ruins the dramatic audio guy that you're listening to like i was walking through and i was listening almost 2 000 years ago disaster struck the bustling town of pompeii as the mighty vesuvius unleashed its awesome power debbie did you eat my last kit kat and i just kept hearing all this well it was there for ages to sell by. It was 79 AD, so a terrible end. And it just, they kept interrupting each other. It was kind of interesting in one way.

Get an earbud, Debbie. Get an earbud. Now it's time for our story about FTX, the ongoing tale of the fall of Sam Bankman Freed and all of the people who lent him money, despite his response to somebody who asked if he should have a board was telling them to go themselves and then they invested anyway we still have to follow this tragic tale of fraud neil can you have a look at this story for us i haven't a clue what

is going on in this i have read over and over again if i've got it straight in my head, this young lad, this crypto Harry Potter fella was worth billions through the hedge fund and FTX, which was this second biggest crypto exchange in the world. Yes. And Binance, this is the bit I like,

Binance looked at saving them when the shit hit the fan, but looked at their finances and said no to a rescue offer for FTX after two hours of due diligence two hours they knew immediately not to touch it it reminded me of a friend of mine who broke his back years ago weightlifting and he's all these scars and pains in it and he went to a physio last year to get to get physio he took off his top and physio went nope and then just

walked out he just washed his hands he had oil in his hands and he just off his top and physio went nope and then just walked out he just washed his hands he had oiled his hands and he just washed his hands and walked out and that's what binance did i just don't understand this it seems to so so ftx created this token which att and they just went this is worth something and people went well why and they went they responded with what your mom said when she was overtired and because i said so that's that's why it's worth something it's because i said so now i wouldn't i loved my mother but i wouldn't make any decisions based on what she said to be when she was in that particular perilous state if i asked my insurance company why the premium was a million quid and they said

because you could be dead in a ditch for all i know it's a similar kind of logical fallacy to fall into so i've read it over and over again and i kind of don't understand what's going on i mean you the problem is you think you don't understand uh what's going on because you think what's going on couldn't be as stupid as you possibly as you think it is it is as stupid as you think it is. Possibly. That's exactly how stupid it is. I mean, first of all, there's nothing to say that money can't be just because you said so. Money originally was just because the king said so. You know, this is the size of my foot, whatever.

I think that the interesting thing about this is Sam Bankman-Fried's like speaking tour where he's going around talking to as many people as possible who aren't the people who are seriously wanting to ask him some questions and who have legal authority but he's like going on twitter spaces he's giving interviews to all and sundry basically playing this like uh betty boop kind of naive character of like i couldn't possibly have known what was going on the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing but but they were both jerking me off. Like it's truly sort of embarrassing to see the first kind of massive millennial fraudster and his self-image polishing, you know, therapy speak. Hey guys,

my bad. I really like, I need to take my ADHD medicine. Otherwise I wouldn't have stolen billions of dollars. Like I just, it's so cringy to me, Jaws. I love those kind of lies as well, because like with all of it, he did this round of interviews where he was saying, like, I didn't really know much about that company. And then the more they've investigated it, they found like a dozen different spreadsheets that he updated at least like once every three months over the last two years. And all of them contain like detailed breakdowns of what the assets and holdings of those companies were so with all of them he was updating these spreadsheets and i love when people like it's that little boy

mindset of what will get me out of this immediate trouble now is if i just go i didn't know anything about it and it's really that kind of it's that same mindset of like i i shat my pants and i hid them in my own wardrobe kind of thing and you think that like nobody's gonna find it and you he knows at the time that he's doing those interviews he knows full well that anyone can go and check and go i just found this well both the creation of your own cryptocurrency to leverage the debts that you own and also this speaking tour where he seems to think that if he talks enough yeah the problems will go away are the signs of somebody who just never has had consequences like this is the first time he's come at a situation that he can't bullshit his way out

of or invent a cryptocurrency and pay his way out of i think you just unwittingly mentioned the name of c.s lewis's first novel which was i shat my pants and hit it in the water yeah it's great he didn't feel he could make Aslan a sympathetic enough character. Yeah, he didn't have the same sort of charm. Yeah, he backed away from it. Yeah, he backed away from it.

But he knew there's something in Aslan so he kept Aslan and put him in later novels. But the very much defecating in the wardrobe was... It was a problem. People didn't go for it.

It was a problem. He was ahead of his time in many ways. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He was ahead of his time. It's a bit of yeah, yeah, yeah. He was ahead of his time. It's a beloved classic now. Yeah, the original story, the horse and his boy

both shat in the wood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The magician's nephew. Based on a novella, number two's in the cupboard, I think. I'm not 100% sure on that. What a weird advent calendar

he designed that year as well. It's such a peculiar scenario. And I get what you're saying about money. Money has value. But we have all genuinely agreed or generally agreed collectively that money has value. Rather than one dude. It's usually backed either by gold traditionally or it was backed by all of us agreeing. Not one dude going, look at this.

I've just decided this is money. And what a weird life he's living. He was apparently living in a compound with nine other people in the Bahamas. And they were apparently all in relationships with each other, which, I mean, I don't know how that works.

Like you all throw your blockchain into a bowl and then whoever's blockchain you pick out. And he's the second biggest donor, I think, to Joe Biden's campaign, or was to one of the presidential campaigns. Well, okay.

So he was very publicly the second biggest donor to Joe Biden's campaign. He was very privately the fourth biggest donor to the opposing campaign. Essentially, he was putting in a bet both ways so that he could keep his hands on the people who would be regulating against him can you imagine it was someone's job to explain black chain to joe biden that's that's who i quite okay it's just somebody with a big just somebody with a big whiteboard saying money malarkey and just talking joe through it did you guys notice that he's got no w on his

keyboard backman freed no they quote him directly twice of like responses he made to queries and the first one he says working on it but the w is in a square bracket which i think means he didn't include a w but it was implied and then his other response was like uh we'll get back to you and the w was again in square brackets so the first time i thought like maybe there was a typo and he meant to type a w and didn't but the second second time I thought, I don't think this guy has a W on his keyboard. That's how he lost control of the money. He can't surf the World Wide Web. You'd think he'd be able to be like, get me another W. I'm a billionaire. But he's got nothing. He can't even replace it. I like the idea of the Excel spreadsheet you mentioned that if only he hadn't updated his

software, because if he'd done that years ago the little paper clip would pop up and go you appear to be using your customers cash to cover the black hole in your hedge funds would you like some help with that to be honest the the the multi-way relationships is the best evidence i have for the fact that for the premise that he didn't know what was going on i don't think it's a fact that he didn't know what was going on. I don't think it's a fact that he didn't know what was going on. I think he should be leaning in on that argument of I was trying to maintain nine simultaneous relationships squared. Of course, I wasn't paying attention to anything. I was constantly getting my dick wet.

That's just a lot of... You'd need an Excel spreadsheet for that, wouldn't you? I mean, that's a lot of admin. Whose night is it tonight? Again, this is evidence that he didn't know what was going on if they don't even know how to keep their genitals separate from other people's partners how are they going to keep their investments separate from their uh deposits i wish you hadn't ended that sentence with the word deposit that brings us to the end of today's show i'm flipping through the ads at the back neil have

you got anything to plug? Yes, I do. A podcast called Why Would You Tell Me That, where we talk to experts about things that we find interesting. So, so far this season, we've talked about why bats don't get old and they don't get cancer as well. We talked to a zoologist and a geneticist about that. And on this week's podcast, we have Susie Dent from Countdown and she explains why we say zigzag and dilly dally and not dally dilly and zag zig.

Oh, that's very good. I want to know now. It's called Ablaut Reduplication, but you can hear it on our podcast. All right. Jaws, what have you got to plug? There's a sitcom that myself and Miranda Holmes wrote quite recently that's out on BBC Sounds. It's called The Dream Factory and it co-stars Stevie Martin and Desiree Burch and all sorts of amazing people. And it's about the people who put the dreams into your head at night.

So that's out on there. And in January, I'm doing a new sort of experiment live stream thing for Mark Watson's Access Festival, which is being streamed on NextUp, so I think if you go to NextUp and then look up Access Festival, you'll be able to find out a bit more about that. I can highly recommend the Dream Factory as well.

It's great work. If you would like to send in stories to us, tweet us at HelloGogglers. I would like to say thank you to our roving reporters for this week, which is Martin, who sent in the Police Kill Robot story, and VB, who sent in the UNESCO Baguette story. I'm Alice Fraser. Find me online

at at alliterative, A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E on Twitter and Instagram or patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. That's a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly Tea with Alice salons, and also I run some writers' meetings there if you have something that you're working on and would like to work on it with me. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your

executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.