The Gargle - Worm revival | Floating colony | Eyeball scanning

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Matt Lieb and Vince Mancini join host Alice Fraser for episode 123 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.All of the news, none of the politics! Worm revival Floating colony Reviews  Milk thief Crypto eyeball scanning Kids face scanHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLEBuy tickets to The Gargle Live at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - Tue 15 and 22 August - go to https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/liveAdvertise YOUR business on The Gargle with an Alice Fraser ad read. Contact [e-mail]-order the D'Ancey LaGuarde Reader book here! http://l8r.it/DHhGCONTENTS 00:00 Start01:42 Front cover04:12 Satirical cartoon04:27 Story 1: Scientists wake up a 46,000-year-old roundworm06:54 Ads08:15 Story 2: OceanGate co-founder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus14:59 Reviews25:38 Story 3: Real estate agent fined $20k for drinking someone else's milk straight from the jug29:27 Story 4: Worldcoin: the cryptocurrency that wants to scan your eyeballs35:49 Story 5: ESRB wants to scan kids' faces to enforce game ratings41:18 Bye / Anything to plug? 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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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. bind the six of you together forever. A dark secret that would eventually lead to alcoholism, broken families, haunting dreams, possible precognition, starring roles on reality television, lives gone off the rails. It wasn't the farmer you ran over accidentally. It wasn't even the farmer you ran over on purpose. Or the werewolf that bit Trish. It was the skinny dipping. You're still back there, in that moment, every time you close your eyes, the thrill, the fear, the nothing sound of underwear hitting the pier and then all of you noticing Andy's genitals at the same time or rather the instead of genitals where genitals should have been you all look and see the gargle this is the gargle welcome to the gargle the sonic glossy magazine to the bugles audio newspaper for

a visual world I'm your host Alice Fraser we bring you all of the news, none of your politics, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Vince Mancini. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. It's a delight. And Matt Lieb.

Hey. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm glad that we're having this Matt Lieb, Alice Fraser, extended universe crossover over the last few weeks. I know. Just keep going. Yeah, just nothing but Alice and Matt, you know,

taking over the world one pod at a time. Finger guns. But before, speaking of fingers, but before we cut our fingers and swear forever to keep secret the things that we learn in today's headlines, let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine for this week. The front cover this week is a photo of a red carpet posing for photographers. The headline reads, with everyone on strike, the red carpet finally gets the spotlight to itself. You guys are in LA. How are you finding that?

Oh man, it's great. I, you know, the writer's strike, the actor's strike, it's great i you know the writer's strike the actor's strike it's really been um it's been great for podcasting because uh now everyone is just like being like hey let's all start a podcast like famous actors and stuff yeah i'm like no no you don't have enough platforms you don't have enough go like audience in your life. You need to take this away from us, too. This is not a medium for famous people, okay? This is a medium for sad people. Do you listen to any podcasts with famous people?

That just seems like a thing that someone financing podcasts somewhere thinks that people do. But I don't know anyone in real life who's like oh i need to i need to hear right an actor starting a podcast is a bit like that thing where mark walberg said if he was on the planes 9-11 wouldn't have gone down the way it did exactly where it's like you're playing smart people if i were to start a podcast it would be me a bunch of beautiful ladies and uh and we would just do push-ups on the podcast and we would all just hold each other's dicks and be like, wow, this is a lot of fun talking about, am I allowed to say dicks? You are.

You're welcome to say dicks as many times as you like. On my podcast, we say dicks and never bleep it. That's my best Boston accent. He was just describing our podcast that we do together. Yeah, but that's that's what podcasts are well except for the yeah except for the girls their part mostly just push-ups you see that with action stars all the time why all these action stars go right wing because they're playing these like really violent macho men and you're like no

you're a dancey fairy boy that's your job right no you're a theater kid stop yeah a good enough actor will convince themselves that they are the characters that they play eventually and it just that's the way it goes i feel like podcasts are the twitter sort of situation where you don't follow people because they're famous you follow people because they have interesting ideas and therefore podcasting is not the area for famous people yeah you follow them because they got nothing to lose yeah yeah yeah you can watch someone burn down their own career and not even know they're doing it. Just like a frog slowly boiling in water. Just watch people slowly become unemployable.

Right, exactly. It's fun. It's nice. Undeniable audio clips. The satirical cartoon for this week, a couple of studio executives gathered around a laptop. Executive 1 says, and then Terminator says, you've made the world a better place, Skynet. And Executive 2 says, told you we don't need writers. Now it's time for your top stories. Top story this week,

worm revival news. This is the news that scientists have just awakened a 46,000 year old roundworm from Siberian permafrost. I was just resting my eyes. Yeah. I was just resting my eyes. Yeah, I was just resting my eyes. Vince Mancini, you've taken a long nap.

Can you unpack this story for us? Oh, yeah. There was a worm, and he was sleeping, and some dickhead scientists came in, and they were like, you know, let's wake him up. And I don't know. Seems wrong to me. Just let him.

He was having a good nap. No, I'm for it. Listen, if you're going to awaken Shai Hulud 40 million years later, I'm glad you're doing it now at the peak of our planet and our society. We're going to be a dune world anyways. You might as well have a nice sandworm in it. I feel like as humans you think, oh, a nice sandworm in it i mean i feel like the yeah as humans you think oh 40 000 years in the future everything's gonna change but if you're a round

worm you probably woke up and was like yeah this is this is the same this is what i remember yeah i mean this is the grittiest reboot of encino man except in this instance the worm is a lady where the moment she woke up, apparently she started having babies in a laboratory dish. Oh, that's right. Isn't a troubling precursor

to any kind of apocalypse that I can think of. Well, I like that it's a traditional worm who understands traditional gender roles and was just like, my role here is to make a bunch of little worms that will end up in my dog's butt somehow.

For 40,000 years, all I've been listening to is the tick-tock of my biological clock. And finally, I'm awake and I can give birth. Hell yeah. I wonder what other horrors they're going to wake up in the permafrost. Like every time, you know, it's like a 110 degree day in Los Angeles. I'm just like, something cool is melting right now. Yeah. Something is thawing out.

Yeah. And it's not going to be like an N64 or something like that. It's going to be something that crawls up your pee hole. Yeah, right. And makes you grow wings. Who knows? Who knows? We will find out, though, as the permafrost increasingly melts

and uncovers all of the secrets and shame of the past. Very excited for it. Could be anything. Your ad section now, because you can't be what you can't buy. You already have a nice smile, but is it sexy? Sex up your mouth with dental floss, the G-string for your teeth. Everyone loves fish, but don't you wish they were more useful? Now they are with starfish.

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for today. And now I want soup. Yeah, that's how capitalism gets you. That's how ads work. Someone just talks about soup and I'm like, I could use a soup. I would like a soup. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Best Podcasts. Here's a show of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry,

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Acast.com Multidirectional folly now. This is the news that the OceanGate co-founder, one of the founders of the company that recently and fatedly sent a submarine deep, deep underwater to implode is planning to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus. Matt Lieb, you like to look at the stars and dream. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah. Well, so I assume that this is the surviving one.

The co-founder who did not suddenly... That seems like a safe assumption. I mean, yeah, probably. Did not implode looking for the Titanic. No, I think it's great. I think it's great, you know. Sorry, just to pause. You are the best detective in like a crime novel.

You walk in and we go, at least we know it's not that guy, the dead guy. No, you know know i like to just poking his pinky in something and tasting it yeah that it was an alive guy who did that yeah uh no it's it's it's you know they listen they think outside the box uh and they're trying to help the world by sending people to places in which they will surely die and i like that he just thought like you know uh well my partner's just imploded uh at the bottom of the sea in another one of our ventures but the press is paying attention to me now so i'm pretty sure like this is my moment this is going to be the time when i sell another big idea this is yeah

i won't make the same mistake again we're not doing the ocean no more now we're going to venus because you know what only men died on that titanic submarine and we need some women who are from venus to die there yeah women are from venus let there. Yeah, women are from Venus. Let's go to where the pussy is. This is the problem with letting billionaires talk to each other because his defense against the accusation that this is a crazy claim is that it is less crazy or less aspirational, as he puts it, than putting a million people on the Martian surface by 2050,

which is a thing that only Elon Musk has said is possible. Yeah, it's funny because his context is only talking to another insane person. And he's like, oh, this was moderate. This was a moderate idea. Well, they have people for all the small things. They have all their household daily tasks taking care of all the mundane things they don't have to think about it anymore it's just other people's problem and so frees them up to think about like the big ideas you know like mars like floating mars place

for money yeah but i mean specifically musk uh is is quite famous for promising things that he absolutely will not deliver in the time frame that he has suggested for them. So I don't... It just... It just... You'd think that... I mean, there was a time where you might believe some of the things.

Like, oh, maybe he could do that. But now that he's proved that he is not capable of changing the sign on his own building successfully, I don't think he's the person to trust with a Mars colony. Yeah, or put a chip in my brain so I can use X without using my hands. Shit like that is not boding well in terms of the confidence level for the intellect of these guys. But at the same time, why are they rich and I'm not?

It's true. They must be much cleverer. Yeah, they must be a little bit more smarter if they're rich and I'm not. Well, it seems like one of the things he's motivated by is the idea that Venus is Earth's twin. One of the things he's motivated by is the idea that Venus is Earth's twin. But if it is Earth's twin, then it is definitely Earth's evil twin. It's basically surrounded by clouds of sulfuric acid, which doesn't seem like the right place to live.

And he sort of agrees on the basis that it will raise eyebrows outside the space industry. And then he goes on to admit it would also raise eyebrows inside the space industry. He doesn't mention that it's easier to raise eyebrows inside the space industry because there's no gravity to keep your eyebrows down so everyone looks constantly surprised so you don't have to wear a bra oh well that's you know that now you're selling me on it now yeah now you're speaking my language you never wanted to go to space before. I want to go to the topless Venus colony. We're all being a little tube together looking out a tiny window at gas. The brief period before we all melt, it'll be pretty hot.

The brief period before I watch every titty melt. It's Earth's twin. It's exactly like Earth. Everything's the same except for the supporting life part we that part the only difference small difference you know yeah but it's uh an important difference nonetheless i don't know i i feel like the uh amount of dangerous places to go on earth is i don't know numerous enough that why can't he just yeah like the ocean for example well no he's like okay i get it ocean bad but have we tried center of the earth yeah

we try go down what if we try go up yeah go up more far right uh like go to stratosphere because it's like at this point you know we're not even at the point where space tourism is really that much of a thing at all and he's like 10 steps ahead he's like let's go to the sun this is what i said this is what happens when they all talk to each other they all just think about the possibilities that their money can build and it's like that that meme of like men will do x number of things instead of going to therapy these people will go to x number of inhospitable environments instead of trying to render the earth's surface hospitable for any length of time like we're all headed into yeah i like that william shatner took

one of those space tourism tours and he came back quote profoundly depressed like that was that was his big takeaway like i'm sad now yeah he came back because he was like uh space is desolate and cold and there's nothing there and it's just an endless landscape of vacuum there's no aliens trying to bang me at all yeah there's not one alien in all of space and he's just like why am am I here? We have all this lack of gravity and not one boob to enjoy its effects. Nothing jiggles in space.

You know? Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Vince Mancini, what have you brought

in for us this week i'm reviewing cold cereal for dessert which i give five stars i think the cereal industry it did us a great disservice my entire childhood trying to convince us that this was a breakfast food because cold cereal is a terrible breakfast like you want something hot and salty and savory with like some cheese and some potatoes it's like you know you get a pass for breakfast i don't want sugary stuff but after dinner that's when you want something cold and sweet and full of milk it's like the perfect dessert food and all these years they've been selling selling a selling to us for the wrong thing i think yeah i 100 agree so five stars excellent it's a bold move out of the gate yeah no it is a delicious thing i i literally have a bowl of cereal every night and there's

a thing that i know about matt uh which is that when he eats his cereal, first of all, he uses nonfat milk, the kind of milk that's kind of blue. And he puts the milk in the bowl first. Yes, I do. And then he puts the bowl in the freezer so that it gets a little bit icy, like some ice crystals.

And then he pours the cereal. And then I pour cereal in later. I've seen it do it. And then he eats it like a little raccoon. Yeah, I eat it in a corner somewhere. I turn off all the lights too. I pour the milk in the bowl. I put the cereal in the bucket.

I lower the bowl of milk into the bucket of cereal. Or else it gets the hose again. Precious. I have your cinnamon toast crunch matt what have we what have we what have you brought in for us this week i'm reviewing a product called baby headphones um baby headphones are uh a thing that we bought for our baby uh it because we were we went on our first plane trip with the baby nine month old baby and i was like okay you know planes are loud and i want i want baby to be able to sleep so we bought a pair of baby headphones these are not music headphones they don't play anything it's kind of like uh when you go to the gun range um or for your british audience uh when you take a baby to the gun range when you take yeah

as we do yeah uh i know british people don't have gun ranges knife ranges whatever you guys have it's wherever uh it's to like cover your ears throw it and stick it in the target yeah yeah the noise comes from people going yeah we did it. I'm just kidding. Do British people mind me doing an impression of British people? I'm sorry. Oh, David Beckham fishing chips. That's what they sound like to me. But I know that we sound weird too. So anyways, it's supposed to lower the volume of the surrounding world.

It's made for babies, size head and everything you know small little headphones um babies will not just sit idly by with big things on their ears just pressing uh so every time we put the headphones on she just rips them right off and we're on this plane and just hoping that she's going to get like ten minutes of sleep and we just keep putting the headphones on and they're so also very heavy things so when she takes them off it snaps and hits her in the face and she starts crying more and honestly I know you can yeah five stars cuz it was hilarious no one star because this is a product that shouldn't exist. This is a product that was made because someone said, oh, I have an idea.

Let's make one of these but for babies. And then never bothered to look to see if this has worked for anybody. So one star for baby headphones. They don't work and they hurt my baby and um you know i mean maybe if i take her to the gun range at some point we will use them but for now yeah one of my favorite things about being a parent is just discovering that like half of the products that people have made for babies they did not think through for for more than five seconds and they just were like well i have your money now and that was yeah this is a captive sleep deprived audience that have

lost all judgment 100 100 most of the purchases that we make for this baby are in the middle of the night desperately seeking a solution for crying and so they know that may i recommend for plane time nap time as somebody who's been traveling uh with my now 21 months old since she was four and a half months old um the cap combination of the carrier her facing you and then just the ruthless hand over one ear and the other ear pressed into a warm chest yeah in terms of maintaining that way better than baby headphones i mean your that sounds way smarter than what matt did but you can do no but i want to buy a product for solution i don't i i know product has solution for most problem so i will continue typing baby and then blank for whatever issue there is baby

anti-depression medication there's been at least four times where i've gotten like a medication from the pharmacy like one of those liquid medications for a baby uh in like a four inch bottle and then they'll give you a syringe that's about two inches long and uh oh oh yeah to pull the medication out from and i'm like someone could have at least like eyeballed this so you didn't have to be an exact measurement but you think you could get like closer than half yeah i feel like almost like they they know you're sleep deprived so they're with you too you know they're just like this will be hilarious when they're trying to feed their baby this like sleepy time medication and they can't reach it so they have to pour it into a little saucer and then use the syringe to take it out with? Well, you have to go to Amazon and buy something called Baby Saucer.

It's like a regular saucer, but for a baby. And then you have to wait for that to show up, and it's a nightmare. I am going to review two things. I normally don't review anything at all. But I'm, first of all, going to review with a question mark Vince Mancini's choice of a flamingo shirt for this podcast for those of you who are watching this on youtube was this a deliberate choice to aggress me or is it just something that you like no i'm in summer shirt mode we decided this about two weeks ago i'm doing uh with all summer theme shirts with patterns and uh and summer themes because you know it's

hot out might as well enjoy ourselves while we sweat to death. So it's not because I'm on the record as saying that using flamingos as decor is a lazy millennial's attempt at whimsicality and that flamingos as a bird are deeply overrated. Yeah, they are stinky. Stinky? overrated yeah they are stinky yeah stinky just long-nosed smug swamp dwelling krill eating baby stealing monsters and they yeah well but they stand on one leg that's why people like them and they're pink that's the main reason it's because they're pink true yeah you from afar

you're like they're fierce that's why we like them. Like, yes, bitch. Like, that's, you look at them and you know they're fabulous. That's why. And you're telling me they stink? They're dressed to krill, you know? I love you. And the other thing that I'm going to review is leaving this Airbnb, which has alternatively locked me out, let robbers in and does an occasional alarm that just we can't turn off and happens for no reason until the people upstairs decide to turn it off.

Not during the robbery. The alarm is saved for after the robbery to just annoy you so you'll never sleep. robbery to just annoy you so you'll never sleep and the review is i uh i'm sending private messages to the person who owns the airbnb agreeing to be in a mexican standoff about leaving a review i'd like we won't leave a review if you don't leave a review because we're mutually assured destruction here because some of the messages i sent at 2 a.m. while locked away from my baby were pretty rage-filled. I can imagine. You were locked away from the baby? Yeah. Oh, my Lord.

Oh, the baby was inside? The baby was inside. I was coming back from the gig. I may have briefly tried to tear an iron security door out of a concrete framework with my bare hands. iron security door out of a concrete framework with my bare hands they're like look we have we have anti-theft devices they're supposed to alert you uh when theft is going on but we never said that they would be timed to the theft like they were just going to go off at some point to alert people that a theft has happened or is about to happen yeah they're essentially one of those precogs in a pool who's like something terrible is going to happen at some point yeah yeah i like the the compromise

here i won't write a bad review if you don't write a bad review um because uh it's like a mutually it's a mutual agreement to not snitch on each other which is i'm personally a fan of so i've got i've got the review uh all keyed up it's in my back pocket my fingers quivering on the trigger we're back to back we're walking away if i hear a gun getting cocked you're pulling the trigger on that one have you showed the review like this is what i would post uh if you don't make me happy not yet we've reached a tentative truce so far in that i've said i understand this is stressful for you too damn wow that's like call center training right there i understand how difficult it can be to not

have your internet working yeah dude yeah yeah and also like is it stressful for them isn't it aren't they isn't the most stress they're having is uh you texting uh hey i got robbed or hey my baby landed in an active construction site from japan with a tired baby that kind of thing you know yeah yeah they're not stressed at all they're like we already got your money we're not we're relaxed over here just laying back watching, watching Righteous Gemstones, and just getting texts from you going, Jesus, figure it out, lady. Milk thief news now.

Matt, you have the sticky fingers of somebody who's been dipping into the cheese section. Can you unpack this story for us? A British Columbia real estate agent has been fined $20,000 after being caught on camera drinking milk straight out of the jug at a home he was showing. Yeah, which, by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with this. And I'm actually considering suing my nine-month-old daughter for the same crime.

Before she came along those were my milky jugs um it's funny because you really don't have to do anything as a real estate agent like you just sort of show up to somebody else's house the milk is like sell it to someone else who wants to buy the house yeah just don't drink the milk i think maybe he just was just like well this is my house now i'm selling yeah yeah you stay in a house long enough trying to sell it you're like i own this place huh it's like the actors where they get convinced that it's their house that they're selling after two real estate industry well he he claims uh that his behavior uh was out of character and that he was quote unusually dehydrated uh at the time because of a new medication,

as well as being under, quote, considerable stress, which is, I assume, just the milk jug staring at him from the other side of the refrigerator, just being like, aren't you thirsty? Well, I didn't need to know that this man's on a Zempik. Yeah, right. Needs to be fined another $50,000 for what he then immediately did in the bathroom. Yeah, you don't want to know what happened. Yeah, milk came out both sides. All right.

Yeah, I still haven't read about a Zempik. Is that the deal that it just makes you poop out all your food? Is that how that works? Among other side effects uh one of the side effects is extremely diarrhea but i think what it's meant to do is mean that food doesn't look good to you anymore oh yeah so it works on both ends on both ends it works exactly less input more output yeah uh yeah no it's it's amazing that there is like a fine for that like usually i assume that like you know first of all if someone drinks the milk we had a house sitter recently and i

you know i noticed a little bit of the milk kind of down a couple of inches um and i didn't know i could take legal action for that and it's nice to know that like in canada they're like you know we don't have a lot of crime but we have a lot of milk crimes that happen. It's all politeness based crime. Right, exactly. It's rigidly enforced. What I want in a milk jug is you know those irritating motivational water bottles

that are like, you're doing it, chug chug chug. But it's like just a milk jug with every inch down the jug it's like $20,000 $40,000. Yeah, $40,000. jug with every every like inch down the jug it's like twenty thousand dollars forty thousand dollars yeah forty thousand dollars man dude i just ate eighty thousand dollars worth of milk it's great i say eight because as you know i like to freeze you put it in the freezer yeah wait till it's crystals and solid i mean now i think if you were the house sitter like previously i would have

thought like this this would be more polite to clean my glass of milk and put it back in the cupboard after i've drank but now it's like i'm gonna leave my dirty glass in the sink just so they can see that i used uh glass and i didn't drink drink straight from the carton yeah i wonder if the fine would have been less if he had used a glass but i think like a good portion of that fine was like right out of the jug, you freaking monster. No, I think it would have been no harm, no foul if there was a glass, right? Like, okay, we can spare a glass of milk.

We're not monsters. Which is crazy. I mean, you know, those are... Canada seems like actually kind of a wonderful place. Like those are the laws that should exist, you know. Now it's time for your eyeball scanning news section. We have two eyeball scanning stories or face scanning or horrifying scanning stories.

WorldCoin, the cryptocurrency that wants to scan your eyeballs, just taking us one step closer to the ultimate end goal, which is where you whisper your deepest secrets into your computer and it lets you send an email. Vince, you've got a lot of secrets. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah. I mean, it's just like, you know how the guy who smashed his partner up in the bottom of the ocean?

ocean well now the guys that uh did a really bad job of uh you know having an alternative to the banking system they want you to let them scan your eyeballs like they can't keep people from just uh taking all of the money from a lot of these crypto things so they're like what if we could scan your eyeballs instead it's pretty great uh like the whole idea around it is that um bots are uh getting increasingly more advanced and that it's difficult to tell whether or not you know anything that exists on the internet came from a bot or from a human and uh which is true i mean like up until now the only way to tell if an account is a bot or not is if they disagree with your opinion on politics but you know because you're always right that's how it works uh but this company is proposing a uh digital proof of personhood by scanning your eye which uh i mean if there's one thing i trust

it's crypto to figure out the world's problems you know like well i mean let's let's be very clear this world coin is being suggested by uh sam altman who's the head of open ai so what we can trust is for crypto to first that create and then solve the world's problem. It's like if McDonald's owned a Zenpick. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's really great. I mean, I think that it's a really great solution. It's like they're resolving this issue

by having humans like willingly give their biometric data to a silicon valley uh adderall fiend who feeds it into like a malevolent supercomputer in exchange for an ape drawing and i think that that is probably the best possible solution to figuring out whether or not someone is real or not is if they do this like i feel like only a bot would actually choose to do this and so uh you know it kind of has the opposite effect but that's just my my two cents on it it feels like in the tech industry in particularly the startup world in the crypto world like 70 to 90 percent of the job of selling any product is being able to sell the product and

yet they are terrible at naming this shit uh the proof of personhood is is created by this iris scanning device which is called the orb give your eye to the orb the orb will say whether or not you are real cool yeah i mean also it feels it feels sort of like an imbalance of power to get a robot to verify whether you're human or not yeah yeah it's kind of bullshit to be like well what do you know you're a goddamn robot and also now you have my eye data doesn't that mean you can be like, now I am you. Ha ha ha ha. Just seems like a bad idea to give it to a bad supercomputer. It also feels like, you know, banks were working pretty well. And then these guys were like, what if no banks?

And you're like, OK, but then people just steal my money all the time. And then they go, OK, but what if a robot scanned your eyeball? Then would you feel comfortable putting your money with us? Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yes. Now I feel a switch.

Yeah. I needed more of my data getting out there. Don't just take my money. Take my eyes. Thanks. Yeah. The worst part about this is that I kind of understand intellectually the idea of like I would like to know the difference between like an

ai bot and a human and it is hard to tell and i feel like there's probably a way but they yeah first of all just smell them and if they smell like a flamingo you know it is not a human but no like the the weird thing about this is according to to the article, that Digital ID platform WorldCoin aims to provide its users with a verified digital identity plus a cryptocurrency token and a crypto wallet app. fact that they're adding all of this security data onto the blockchain is so funny because it's just like yeah it's like the most secure technology in the world next to the word document called mypasswords.doc you know what i mean it's like the idea is that you are you think you would be less likely to be scammed by a real person as opposed to an ai like oh i mean as long as i'm giving this money to a person on the blockchain who has never scammed another person right unlike ai who are malevolent for some reason yes yes i resent being asked by a robot to prove that i'm not a robot

like if i'm halfway through trying to log into something and it says prove you're not a robot and then i have to go off and like love deeply suffer incredibly live a full and passionate life and by then you know login page is timed out you can't get into your amazon cart yeah the worst thing is like captchas have gotten to the point where like they get really complicated and if you ever like been like confronted with a really hard captcha where it's like what are the numbers here and all you see is lines and you're like am i a computer or the security questions that are like really like qualitative emotion based like what shirt were you wearing when you had your first kiss and you're like i don't what can i just can i just tell you where i was born and an even better scanning news story this is scanning children's faces news uh this is the news that the entertainment software rating board uh wants

to scan children's faces to make sure they're not just clicking i'm over 18 in order to get into all the sexy games um matt lieb you've played a sexy game i assume you've played leisure suit larry can you unpack this story for us oh yeah i played a lot of i played a game called virtual valerie once it was uh you just uh you could choose how you had sex it was great um anyways uh yeah the uh entertainment software ratings board Anyways, yeah, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which is the MPAA for video games, and they're the people who put those E ratings or T ratings or M ratings. You know, T is for teen, E is for everyone, M is for mature. They're prepared to enforce who plays what games by literally scanning players' faces to determine via software how old they are uh and you know so they keep m for mature for just adults you know that way if you're a kid playing a game you know you won't you know that you won't be able to play call of duty because

that's too much violence i guess um, so the proposed system would ask the user to take a photo of their face and check for a live human presence, then submit the photo for, quote, estimation of age, which is like, great, finally a way to stop video game companies from exploiting our children by sending pictures of them to some sort of pedophile robot who will look and see if your lips are too full to be an adult i just want to collect millions of pictures

of children's faces no nothing for us just give me children i require to do anything with this our entire industry is not built on digitizing a human form so we will be the best curators of this information also that like we can the current facial recognition software half the time it doesn't work for like people of non-white races because they didn't test it on enough right uh people outside of their own office i'm sure it's going to work really well for like figuring out what people what age people are well cops can't seem to do it yeah right like i i've yet to use a filter on like either like instagram or tiktok that does the like guess your age thing that i didn't think was secretly programmed to do a bit just burning me you know like every time i do it it's like 58 and i'm like you just

you know any jews computer you know how jews age you age like avocados okay i'm actually i was young once but i'm not that old okay 38 and creamy yesterday yeah i was perfect and creamy yesterday and now i'm brown and sagging and my pit just falls out you don't even have to scoop it out you're in the sweet spot you're just a man you're not an old man you're not a young man you're just a man i'm just a man i'm just a man who wants to play animal crossing and now the computer says i'm too old to do it well you pedophile robot does it work backwards that's the real question you know if it if are you are you too old for pokemon you know will it tell you like you got

to get out of here weirdo because that i kind of agree with tick tock yeah yeah i'm kind of for that i would listen as a parent i would love to keep all bad things away from my child. And I would love to do that without ever putting forth any effort on my part. So scan their faces. I say, take a little finger prick, you know, a little blood. Take some of the blood of my children

and, you know, help keep them safe. Test the levels of innocent in your urine look i want the algorithm algorithm to raise my children but i want it to be a good algorithm yes yeah if you scan my kid's face and tell me you're good okay i really hate for it when uh the algorithm is problematic that's's always the worst. I'm like, yikes, algorithm that controls our daily lives and thoughts and dreams. I think that's really nice that you want that for your daughter. I just want for my children

what I want, what I think everyone wants really secretly, which is that I want to do so well in life that in 25 years time they get dogpiled on the internet for being a Nipo baby. Oh, God. Knock wood. That's, I think, we all want that. I would, I really, if I could years time they get dog piled on the internet for being a nepo baby oh god knock wood that's i think we we all want yeah i would i really if i could make my daughter's life hell in a few years by being just so successful that people resent her because of it yeah i want to be successful enough

that their success will be considered mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I want her to have a complex about not being able to live up to all of the pee-pee-poo-poo jokes that I tell on the microphone. I'll never do pee-pee-poo-poo like my dad. I'm not you. I don't want your life. I want one of those moments, you know? Varsity Blues.

It was a big movie in America. I've not heard of it. Okay, so James Van Der Beek, right? He's like, he played Dawson. And now it's time for the end of the show. We're flipping through the ads at the back. Matt Leib, have you got anything to plug? Yes, I do.

First and foremost, Vince and I do a podcast called Pod Yourself a Gun, which is both a Sopranos rewatch podcast, and now it is a The Wire rewatch podcast. You were on it recently, and it was a lot of fun. Your episode is one of my favorite episodes that we've uh we've done um so yeah i was so tempted to subscribe at the eight dollar level on your patreon all just before the episode that i was on in the hope that then you would have to read my name at the end of the episode and make it like questionable as to whether i was brought on on

my own merits or if i'd be on my way on somehow. But then I just didn't credit you with the organizational ability to line those up. No, you would have been my choice. I would have been weeks later and I would have been like, oh, that would have been funny. But yeah, so listen to that. And then also me and my wife, comedian Francesca Fiorentini, are going to be headlining at the Punchline in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 17th. So you can get your tickets at punchlinesanfrancisco.com or just Google the punchline San Francisco do whatever way you get to it

get your tickets Tuesday October 17th 8pm myself and Francesca Fiorentini who is much more successful than I am but

I'm a man so but her success is your success now because you guys are married that's right one flesh one billing credit that's right vince have you got anything to plug uh yeah i mean most of my plugs are also matt's plugs uh we do the

podcast together which you can find at patreon.com slash broadcast uh but i also have a newsletter now called the content report where i write about, you know, movies and TV and Internet stuff, and that's at vincemancini.substack.com. I highly recommend supporting both of those things. You guys are great podcasters, and you're a great writer, Matt, and also Vince. I'm going to subscribe to this content report. I am doing my show, Twist,

at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at 8.30 at the Underbelly Bristow Square. I will also be doing two live gargles the 15th and the 22nd of August. So if you are in Edinburgh, drop by and see that. Otherwise, you can find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser. It's a one-stop shop for all of my standout specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly writers' meetings and salons and book clubs. I do lots of stuff over there patreon.com slash alicefraser I've also got a book I've got a book coming out at unbound.com go to unbound.com

and write in alicefraser to get to the page and buy a copy of the dancy lagarde reader I say go to unbound.com and type in alicefraser because I guarantee you will not spell Dancy Lagarde correctly the first time I didn't and I made it up. So please buy my book. Big thanks to our roving reporters who have sent in stories that they think we would like this week. PK, Miss Otis and Robert Silito who sent in the Worm Revival story. PK also sent in the Venus story and Robin Shant sent in the Milk Swigging story as well as a few people on my Patreon and Robert sent in both stories in the eyeball scanning section. So big week for Robert Silito this week.

Or I assume a slow week at work. If you'd like to be a gargle-roving reporter, tweet us at... Sorry, X us at HelloGogglers. On X. Where we remain. Because a sinking ship in a vast ocean is still vaguely floating. 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 programmes from The Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.