846. Topic Tombola with James 🎧 | Luke's ENGLISH Podcast - Learn British English with Luke Thompson

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You're listening to Luke's English Podcast.

Hello, listeners.

Welcome back to Luke's English podcast.

Here I am.

It's me, Luke, of course.

You're listening to my podcast.

And here I am doing the introduction to this episode.

I'm currently standing in the middle of our living room slash kitchen at home, because I'm at home with the baby today, looking after him and trying to do bits of work as well, although that's very difficult because you know there's a baby and that means that he needs lots of attention got to change his nappy, got to feed him, got to play with him, pick him up from time to time and just do all that stuff.

But I'm attempting to do work as well.

And I'm taking this opportunity now to record the introduction to this episode, because he is, that's the baby.

My son is currently strapped to my chest again and is, I think, asleep.

I can't actually see his eyes, but I'm pretty sure he's asleep.

I've worked out this is the only way.

As I said I think maybe in the last episode or the one before that I've worked out.

This is pretty much the only way I can do recordings when I'm looking after him is to just strap him to me.

And I think he likes the warmth and he likes the movement because I'm standing up, I'm on my feet.

So he likes the movement and the warmth and it's like a hug experience being strapped in the baby carrier.

So he tends to fall asleep and that's when I can do these recordings right.

Anyway, I'm doing an introduction for this episode.

I don't want the introduction to go on too long, but I still feel like I need to do an introduction.

The reason why I'll explain in just a second.

So this episode is another conversation with my brother, James.

It's been a little while since we had a kind of rambling conversation on this podcast.

His last appearances on the podcast were to talk about specific subjects.

So we did one about ambient music.

We did one about the film, the fantastic comedy film.

The classic comedy film Spinal Tap.

This is Spinal Tap.

So we've talked about some specific subjects in episodes recently.

I say recently, I guess that was in the last year or so.

But here is an episode which is a bit more rambling, where I wanted a more natural conversation, not just focused on one specific thing, but one that would allow us a bit more freedom to move naturally from one subject to the next.

And so that's what we've got.

I'll give you an idea of the topics that are going to come up in a moment.

Now, James is probably the guest that's been on this podcast more than anyone else, because he obviously is my brother.

And so he's been there from the very, very beginning.

He, I think, first appeared on the podcast in episodes 50 something.

I don't know.

I can't remember.

But he's two years older than me, just about two years older than me.

We're very close.

We're on the same wavelength.

We share a lot of the same references.

We understand each other quite closely.

When the two of us talk to each other, we go off on different tangents, referencing films and music and television programs.

Sometimes, when we're at home with my parents, James and I will kind of go off on a tangent that my mum and dad don't really understand, or my wife.

You know they can't really follow what we're talking about, but we know exactly what we're talking about.

We have all the same references and we're on the same wavelength.

Now I hope that that means that our episodes are kind of fun to listen to, because there's a flow, you know, because we follow each other's thoughts and complement the things that we say.

And we end up in some funny, you know, we end up talking about some funny things and stuff.

I hope that makes these episodes sort of fun to listen to.

But what happens is, whenever I record an episode like this, where we talk about very specific things, we end up referencing maybe films music, TV shows which for us are very familiar and clear to us.

But for you, these things might be very obscure.

Yeah.

So after recording, I always kind of, When I listen back to the episodes like this that I record, I kind of think, oh my God, what on earth are my learners of English around the world going to make of this?

I kind of think, hopefully the fact that it's a close conversation between my brother and me, with humour in it and stuff that's going to make it engaging and hopefully compelling and easy to listen to and therefore good for your English.

But then, on the other hand, I kind of think I just know from my experiences of working with learners of English that it's quite easy to lose you.

You know, it's quite easy to lose you.

Now I don't know exactly you, specifically you, what your reference points are, how familiar you are with James as a guest on this show.

If you're a very long-term listener and you're still listening, then well done.

Hopefully you aren't a skeleton with headphones on.

But if you're a long-term listener then maybe you're really into these episodes with James and you're able to keep up with us and you understand the rhythms and the reference points.

Who knows?

Maybe we're just going to completely lose you by talking about the things we talk about.

I don't know.

So those worries are with me, right?

But yesterday I was at the British Council where I work.

I was there in the evening for an event.

And I met a Lepster.

I met a listener of this podcast.

He came up to me and he felt compelled to talk to me because he loves listening to this show, which was obviously very nice to hear.

But he came up and we talked and stuff and it was really nice to meet him.

And he said to me, Luke, your episodes are fantastic.

Your episodes are fantastic and really helpful for my English.

Thank you so much.

And there's me in my head thinking oh no.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm losing everyone with these rambling conversations that reference things that other people might not understand.

Here's me thinking that.

And then this guy, I don't remember his name.

Sorry if you're listening, I didn't catch your name.

But anyway, he's there saying, your episodes are fantastic, they really help.

And I couldn't help saying to him but really, what about those very specific episodes, or those episodes where, for example, I'm talking to my brother and we talk about all these films and TV shows, or we are quoting lines from Alan Partridge or from Spinal Tap, or we're talking about the history of some obscure rock band?

You know, what about those?

And he said, no, those are fantastic as well.

We really appreciate those, he said.

And I said, but don't you kind of get lost? and get confused.

And he said, no, no, it's all right because you clarify things, don't you?

He said, it really helps.

Just little comments that you make can really help to keep us involved and keep us on track and to help us to understand what you're talking about.

And he said, sure, there are some things we don't get, but we still enjoy the world of it.

And, you know, it's just very nice and cozy to be in that world and to be following you.

And we really appreciate those moments when you sort of come out of the podcast and just explain something or clarify something.

So that was very reassuring and encouraging for me and made me think again about this particular episode that you're going to listen to.

So yes, a conversation with James.

I wanted to do something natural and free-flowing, but at the same time, I wanted to make sure that we talked about some topics that I know James is enthusiastic about at the moment.

And so I came up with this concept where we could kind of randomly choose different subjects.

Let me give you an idea of what those subjects are.

So those subjects, and this is in no particular order, include books that James has read recently.

In particular he talks about a book about the English band Joy Division And also the band New Order right.

Some of you listening were like, yes, I know Joy Division.

I know New Order.

This is fantastic.

I love those bands.

If you don't know those bands, they are in terms of British music.

They are really important bands that came from Manchester in the late 70s and the 80s.

And they're part of the sort of post-punk era.

Manchester music scene.

Okay.

Now again going back to the thing about the reference points that James and I both know about.

Those things are very.

Those things may seem a little bit obscure to you.

I don't know what your context is and how much you know about, for example, British popular culture or generally sort of popular culture from the English speaking world or from the world.

I don't know if it's necessary to say the English-speaking world.

I don't know what your reference points are.

And so those things might seem very obscure to you.

But for us, for James and me, these are very kind of relevant parts of our shared culture that we grew up in and that we use a lot, that we reference when we communicate.

This is the world that James and I inhabit.

And so partly what we want to do is to bring you into that world and teach you about these things and help you learn English in the process.

You see, that's kind of the idea.

So a book that James read, there's also the subject of aliens, right?

Do aliens, have aliens arrived on earth?

Because you may have seen in the news or on social media, was it just a few months ago?

There was a kind of congressional committee hearing in the United States.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so there was a congressional hearing about UFOs.

Some former military officials made some strange claims about UFOs under oath.

So they, you know, lifted their hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

So this is under legal oath.

They came and they made these statements about how maybe they've seen aliens or maybe they've been contacted by UFOs.

It was very strange.

And it certainly set a lot of people speculating about whether they were true.

In fact, even though they were saying these things under oath, people were speculating about whether they were true.

People were speculating about whether, for example, the US does have access to UFO technology and all that sort of stuff.

So what the hell's going on there?

What's all that about?

So that's one of the subjects that we talk about.

That one actually comes up near the end of the conversation.

So if you're particularly interested in the alien stuff, you'll have to just keep listening to the other bits.

There's also the question of chat GPT, of course.

I mean, it's something that's on my mind and lots of people's minds at the moment.

But the question I had for James was this.

When you use ChatGPT, how polite are you with it?

Do you always say please and thank you with ChatGPT and why or why not?

And this leads to a conversation about AI in general and frankly, whether it's going to kill us all or not, and how and why.

We have a conversation, a discussion about that. which is quite serious, I suppose.

And then also I asked James about film and TV quotes, which often come into our heads.

And that might seem a bit strange.

And, to be honest, this part of the conversation, the bit about film and TV quotes.

This is probably the most obscure part that, to be honest, I was Although I enjoyed that part of the conversation with James very much I was concerned that that would be the bit that could lose you.

And so when we get to that section, I will be coming into the podcast, interrupting sometimes in order to explain.

The films we're talking about, or the TV shows we're talking about, or the little cultural reference points.

So it's going to be quite a long episode because the conversation was quite long, but also I have to step in, as you're here, and explain little bits and pieces.

But hopefully, like the Lepster that I met yesterday, hopefully you'll appreciate those things.

Okay, so here we go then.

Here is a rambling conversation with James in which we reference films music bands, weird issues going on in the world and more.

Okay life, the universe and everything, the important things, the trivial things, it's all here for you.

That's it for this introduction.

Let's get started.

Let's talk to James.

He was in London.

I was in Paris.

Here we go.

Hello, James.

Welcome back onto Luke's English podcast.

Hello.

Oh, interesting way to say hello there.

In the sort of posh way.

Sort of a posh hello.

Hello.

James.

Yes.

I thought that for this episode that we would have no specific topic this time.

Because often on the podcast we choose a specific thing you know, often like a musical thing, like about a band or something.

Last time we talked about ambient music.

This time I thought, no specific topic, but I wanted to know how that makes you feel.

How does it make you feel to be on the show with no particular plan or idea of what we're going to talk about?

Hmm, interested, excited, excited.

I can't think of the right words.

Slightly nervous.

The wheels are off.

No, the safety wheels are off.

What do they call it?

The stabilizers are off.

The stabilizers.

When you're a kid learning to ride a bike, you have stabilizers on the back.

And then at one point, your dad probably takes them off.

And then, whoa, we're riding without stabilizers.

You feel all nervous because you might crash.

Yeah, the safety rail is disengaged, whatever that is.

That's right.

I don't know.

I've run out of really bad metaphors, so yeah.

Often when we talk about doing a podcast together, you always say we should do something about this or we should do.

You know, you always name specific kind of things that we should do an episode about.

And I understand your reasons for that.

But can you tell me your reasons for that again, even though I understand them?

Why do you always like to do a specific thing?

Probably because I used to write articles for a magazine and I quite enjoy a deep dive, so to speak.

And I kind of have subjects I'm obsessed about that no one else will talk to me about.

So it's just an excuse to kind of go on and on about something that I find really interesting, that probably no one else does.

Yeah, and I think there's an appeal for that sort of thing with my audience.

They've probably come to expect, if you're on the show, that we're going to do a deep dive into some classic bit of British music and popular culture.

I mean, I wanted to do an episode about the film Blow Up.

You wanted to do a whole episode just about this...

This movie from the 60s.

It's an obscure 60s film called Blow Up, because I'm still kind of struggling to understand it myself and I find by the process of discussing and analysing a subject you can create some deeper meaning within yourself and the world.

But the thing from my point of view, thinking about my audience, is what would be the takeaway value for my listeners, my audience of learners of English around the world?

What's their takeaway, James, from an episode about a film from the 60s?

Good question.

Probably why you decided not to go with that idea.

None, really.

Except it might gain some deeper insight into life itself, maybe.

Maybe not.

If you tunnel down, if you drill down into a specific topic, even an obscure film from the 1960s arguably not that obscure, but it depends on you know who you are.

Um, drilling down into something specific yeah, you can ultimately drill deep into the uh, the human condition and what it really means.

Universal truths about the human condition.

Exactly, i think and um maybe maybe, if all your listeners go out and find a copy of blow up, watch it in preparation for next time, So everyone will be prepared and they'll have watched the film and we can talk about it in depth for about four hours.

Do you think that's going to be... How many people...

Will A, do that, and B, enjoy the film?

Three and zero.

Because to be honest, I've seen it a few times.

I didn't enjoy it the first time I saw it.

Why are you recommending it to everyone?

Because it's a brilliant film.

And it's one of those films you have to watch like four times and then you go oh right right, right.

If that's what you want listeners, if you want to go oh oh oh oh oh right right, right right.

If that's what you're looking for, then go out and get yourself a DVD or even better, a VHS.

No, not a VHS.

Get a DVD or possibly Blu-ray copy.

Or you can stream it probably somewhere of the film Blow Up, directed by blow up direct um and so on, an italian guy, and the point is it's kind of a 60s film, which is it doesn't paint the 60s to be that nice.

It's kind of a bit of a takedown of the 60s culture, i think, and the main character is quite an unpleasant character.

So when you first see you just think well, these are just not very nice people and this is not a very nice film and sounds wonderful.

You're really selling it.

It's a bit of a critique of the 60s, but also kind of a celebration of the 60s, but mainly a critique and at the heart of it is a great mystery.

I actually personally love films like this.

Maybe I shouldn't second-guess my audience.

There's me going, I don't think my audience are going to be into that.

Meanwhile, I'm into that.

I think it's fascinating.

I haven't seen the film.

I've seen some clips from it, and it's always interesting to kind of like...

I think it's quite an authentic view of what London, swinging London was like in the 1960s.

And that's you know.

It's always fascinating to take a little trip back in time to see how things used to be.

Michelangelo Antonioni.

That's him.

Antonioni.

Michelangelo Antonioni directed it.

And because he's an outsider to the scene, he has a kind of a more cold-eyed view.

If cold-eyed, is that a word?

Yeah, less enamored with the whole culture and possibly more you know you can see more when you're not sort of part of it.

So much right, a bit more object objectivity, objective view, and doesn't necessarily come out of it that well.

The whole culture?

Yeah, because it's interesting, because in the UK we probably romanticize that period in our sort of recent history.

Yeah, the 1960s, it was like cool.

It was all about London.

We were the tastemakers.

All the popular culture was coming out of London.

It was the Beatles.

It was the Rolling Stones.

It was Mary Quant.

And it was all really cool and groovy and hip.

And weren't we brilliant?

Actually, if you look at it with a cold eye, as you said, maybe it wasn't such a wonderful time and there were all sorts of what's the word for it.

There was kind of lots of sexism and questionable behavior going on under the guise of like liberation, liberation.

Yeah.

And and permissiveness.

Yeah.

Stuff like that.

So let's move on.

We're not going to talk about that.

Yeah, I said no specific topic this time.

Then we talk about something very specific for 10 minutes.

Basically yeah, I thought that by having no specific focus we could maybe not alienate people, you know, because I don't want to turn anyone into an alien.

But I don't want to alienate people.

So let's just have a conversation that sort of evolves naturally as it moves forward.

The evolve doesn't revolve.

Yeah, an evolutionary rather than revolutionary conversation.

Okay.

So I have actually got some questions.

I've got a kind of rough outline, but anyway.

So do you remember the nickname that we came up for ourselves on this podcast before?

The Glib Brothers?

The Glib Brothers, yeah.

Do you want to explain that?

Because again, that's another little joke that a lot of people won't understand, except maybe one person, one listener called Pierre, who is fond of the nickname.

But I don't know if it's really stuck with anyone else because no one else has ever mentioned it.

But here we are again, folks, the Glib Brothers in action.

Can we explain that?

That's kind of a joke, a joke name, isn't it?

The Bee Gees are the Glib Brothers.

Oh, the Gib Brothers.

Sorry, the Gib Brothers.

The Bee Gees.

Barry, Thingy and Thingy, the Gib Brothers.

Oh, God, if I can just think clearly, I'll be able to tell you their names.

Amazing Harmonies in the Bee Gees.

Barry, Morris and Robin, of course.

That's it.

The Gib Brothers, who have three brothers in sort of popular music and rock, who have an amazing vocal style of harmonising.

They were famous for the music from the John Travolta film Saturday Night Fever.

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk.

I'm a woman's man.

No time to talk.

You're welcome, everyone.

But there's a lot more to them than that.

Yes.

They predate that.

They had a few hits in the 60s as well, and then they kind of went quiet and then came back for the 70s.

I think they went solo.

I think one of them went solo and they kind of missed each other and there was a bit of an ego trip going on and then they reunited and had another wave of success.

Yeah, I actually think they're a really great group.

There's only one of them left now.

Did you know that?

No, I didn't know that.

Yeah, so let's see.

So the one that's left is Barry, the sort of probably most famous one.

The one with the hair.

The one with the hair and the big teeth.

Although they've all got... sort of interesting features, or they all had.

But Barry was the most famous one, I guess.

Then there's Robin, who in the 60s was more of the lead vocalist.

Yeah.

And then there's the third one that people often sort of forget, and that's Morris.

It was the kind of the glue that held them together, the funny one, I believe.

Yeah, and I think he also was the secret weapon.

There's like every band.

I've come up with this theory that every band has got a secret weapon, meaning a member of the group who quietly, or perhaps the one who's not quite as obvious as the others, but they are really important and bring a whole other dimension to the group.

So in the Bee Gees, I think it's Morris, he played the keyboards and he...

Although he didn't have the most instantly recognisable voice, I think he was the glue that held those three-part harmonies together, or something.

So he was their secret weapon.

He might have been a songwriter too, I think, but in other bands there are secret weapons as well.

Can you think of any?

Who would be the secret weapon in, say, the Rolling Stones?

Yeah. uh secret weapon charlie watts for sure yeah fair enough because you think rolling stone's the most obvious one so the secret weapon is the member of the band who's not the really obvious one the one that's you know that people instantly think of but they're the one that still without them it it just wouldn't be the same although having said that i did see the rolling stones last year without charlie watts and they were amazing but they were probably playing charlie's Yeah, the new drummer, I think his name's Steve Jones.

No, it's Steve Jordan.

The new drummer for the Rolling Stones is Steve Jordan.

Steve Jones was the guitarist in the Sex Pistols.

I'm getting my rock stars mixed up.

Please forgive me.

Definitely was doing a bit of a Charlie Watts impression on a lot of those songs.

So he was playing Charlie's parts very, very well.

What about the Sex Pistols?

Who would be the secret weapon in that?

I actually think it's Steve Jones.

He's not the secret weapon.

No?

He's well known, well known to be the powerhouse.

I think it would either be Glenn Matlock, who secretly wrote not secretly, but wrote a lot of the songs.

Yeah.

Or even Paul Cook, the drummer, who's an amazing.

He's probably one of my favourite drummers.

Yeah, he never overplays.

I mean, he's just bloody good, ruddy good drummer.

I think i don't know, would it be fair to say glenn matlock, because he brought a certain kind of although he wasn't as cool as the others at all, and they eventually chucked him out because he was annoying and they went for sid vicious, who had the image um, did he not bring a certain musicality that actually helped the group?

Yeah, he wrote a lot of the best songs really.

And I think his musicality was tempered by Steve Jones, who kind of simplified all his riffs.

But without Glenn's kind of initial input they wouldn't have had that kind of poppy edge that you need, or sort of melodic edge.

Yeah, other bands.

The Who.

It's difficult with The Who, because the thing about The Who is that they're four guys and they're all playing lead.

They all think that they are the star of the show, especially Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon.

So surely the secret weapon is the bass player, John Entwistle.

Who looked so bored most of the time, looked like he'd rather be doing anything else.

And yet he definitely held the band together, especially when Keith was in the group.

Because Keith, the drummer, would be doing this crazy stuff, like really all over the place.

Very musical, really supporting the songs, but kind of very messy.

And...

John Entwistle, the bass player, was really holding everything together and he was like the rhythm and the beat and also provided a lot of support to Pete, the guitarist.

You know, he kind of laid down a lot of I don't know how to say.

It really filled the sound a lot with his bass parts and he did vocals as well.

He did high-pitched falsetto backing vocals too and wrote some songs and did some arrangements.

So he's definitely the secret weapon in The Who.

Success Story is one of my favourites, and that's by him.

That's by him, yeah.

And it's a really cynical take on life as a rock star, I suppose.

Yeah.

You can check that out.

It's available on the internet.

We got a bit distracted.

The Glib brothers.

It's a joke about the... Go on.

Glib means... Glib just means silly, flippant, not paying too much respect to something.

Not being very serious.

Maybe just talking sort of without being too thoughtful, which is not entirely.

You know we're fairly thoughtful, but maybe we're just a bit silly and just having a bit of a laugh most of the time.

Anyway, let's talk about something.

Anyway, here we are, the Glib Brothers.

Now, I was thinking of ideas for this episode.

It still sounds like we're in the introduction, but we're not.

So I had a list of ideas for what to call this episode or the sort of structure of the episode.

You can tell me what you think.

Here's the list, all right?

Here we go.

Toilet roll, bananas.

Oh, no, that's my shopping list.

I could do an episode on toilet roll and bananas, no problem.

Yeah, me too.

No, here are the things I thought of on the Metro this morning.

This is a bit like Alan Partridge pitching TV show ideas to Tony Hayes.

But here we go.

So we've got question tennis.

That's one idea.

Another idea is this.

Unfiltered, unashamed and unprepared.

Another idea, um third one is this topic tombola topic topic, tombola.

It's quite hard to say, i like that.

And then the fourth one is the talking test.

The talking test can you talk?

You can?

Well done.

You've passed the test.

Actually, I've got no idea what the talking test involves.

I just quite liked the name of it.

I don't know what it would be.

That's just a title.

That's just a title, yeah.

Can I interrupt while you still have a few listeners left?

I've got an album coming out.

You've got an album coming out, really, like a music album.

An actual proper album, not self-released, on an actual proper fricking label.

A label, an already established label, that's it.

You're a signed artist on an actual record label.

Nothing's been signed and, yeah, but apart from that, it's a one album situation.

Mm-hmm. by my alias, which I'm still not sure I like the name, but it's Glytek Audio.

Glytek Audio.

This is your new alias, your artist name.

I'll tell you why.

Because James Thompson, there's about a million of them.

Jim Thompson.

There's about another million of them, the most prominent of which is a very right-wing, Trump-supporting country music singer.

So I don't really want to be confused with them.

And you know, if you go on Discogs there's like a number next to the title, next to the artist's name.

And with Jim Thompson, there's about 36 of them.

There's about 36.

So it couldn't be my name.

I had to think of a name.

And Glytech Audio is slightly based on Alan Moore's Snake God Glycon, who is a Roman puppet god, which was actually a satire on the culture of the pantheon of gods, I believe by some Roman satirist who invented a god which was basically ludicrous.

So, instead of taking Alan Moore's basic point, which is you should find your own god, I just stole his.

And just renamed it slightly.

I did the word tech at the end with a K.

Anyway, we're going off on one.

So that was all I wanted to say.

It's called Mood Selector, which is a bad pun about the function Mode Selector.

What's Mode Selector then?

It's the selector of modes on a machine of some sort.

So you've got, like, different modes.

Right, but not Mode Selector, folks.

It's Mood Selector.

So you can select which mood.

What moods are available?

What's the selection of moods that's available?

Happy.

Sad.

Maybe sleepy.

Is that a mood?

Is sleepy a mood?

I don't know.

I think that counts as it's not an emotional state, is it?

Sleepy.

Nostalgic.

Is that a mood?

Nostalgic?

Yeah, I'd say that's a mood.

Yeah, nostalgic.

Excited.

Ecstatic.

Yeah.

So those are a few of the moods available on my album which is coming out soon, on Touched Revolutions.

What?

Touched Revolutions?

Touched Revolutions.

Which is a subsidiary of Touched Music.

Wait, Touched Music or Touched Music?

Touched with a D. Not touched with a T, touched with a D. No, not douched.

T-O-U-C-H-E-D.

Revolutions.

These are revolutions which have been touched.

Touched in some way.

It's a subsidiary of Touched Music, so it's Touched Revolutions, which is a sub-label.

Touched Revolutions does make sense for DJing though, because that's what happens in DJing, isn't it?

They touch the record and stop revolving at a certain speed.

Records go around, they revolve and you touch them.

Yeah, to like slow them down or speed them up.

So it's you know that's what DJing is.

It's basically touched revolutions.

Well, how very applicable.

But I'm really chuffed.

It's kind of a life goal.

You know, let's talk about life goals and all the bucket lists.

I hate that word, bucket list, before you kick the bucket.

Things to do before you die.

As if you can do anything after you die.

Yeah.

So here are the things I want to do before I die, and here are the things I want to do after I die.

You know, silly, isn't it?

So it's one of those.

OK, a bucket list.

You're having a record released on a label.

Again, it's called Mood Selector by Glytek Audio.

What kind of music have you gone for?

It's, broadly speaking, techno.

Techno, broadly speaking techno.

Broadly speaking techno, which is a genre I've invented.

There's techno, there's ambient techno, there's broadly speaking techno.

We're being glib again.

It's a bit of electro, a bit of techno, maybe a bit of acid house, a bit of ambient.

Alkaline house?

Interesting.

Acid apartment?

Acid indigestion.

Acid tent.

So, yeah, look out for it in all good record shops and some bad ones as well.

No, I think it's probably only going to be available online, actually.

I don't know if any record shops stock it, but my mate who owns a record shop could possibly order some in, so I might ask him about that.

And it's only on CD.

Only on CD?

Okay, you're really going for the hipster market with this.

Well, on and online, but vinyl is out of the picture, I'm afraid.

It's just too damn expensive.

Okay.

So what, people can buy it for, they can stream it?

It'll be streamable.

In fact, you can stream some of my pre-existing stuff already under that name Vlitek Audio, on Spotify and YouTube and all that.

Please do, because no one has.

I haven't advertised it.

I haven't done any marketing.

So my stuff is just sat there, unlistened at the moment.

So everyone, and by everyone I mean those people who are interested in this kind of thing, which obviously is all of you right?

Just Google Glytek Audio, G-L-Y-T-E-K Audio, and you'll find James's stuff, his musical stuff.

I mean not just all of his stuff, but you'll find his musicals.

Yeah, the self-release stuff is out at the moment, which doesn't really count because anyone can self-release, but this one is on an actual label.

I can't believe it.

Okay, brilliant.

Brilliant.

Well done.

You can play a bit now if you want.

Play an exclusive or edit it in later.

I'll edit that in.

I'll pipe that in later somehow.

OK, so this is me piping in a clip of James's forthcoming musical release on Touched Revolution Records.

Glitec Audio with Mood Selector.

It's techno, broadly speaking.

Broadly speaking, techno.

Glitec Audio mood selector.

I'll let you guess which mood this is.

Here's a few seconds of it.

Here we go.

So you see, broadly speaking, techno.

So what mood do you think that is?

Here's a set of possible moods that you could select for that.

Not that that's what you have to do when you listen to the album.

It's just music.

But anyway, it could be what?

Anger, sadness, depression, happiness, fear, anxiety, calmness, frustration, excitement.

That's the word.

Annoyance disgust envy loneliness optimism gloom boredom hostility cheerfulness hopefulness disappointment worry shame, joy or just feeling nervous.

Which mood is it?

It's all of those moods, isn't it?

It's just all the moods, but just in the future.

It's like you're on public transport in the future, like kind of far into the future, where everything is really clean and efficient and everything's run by AI.

And it's all public transport.

There's no private transport anymore.

And it's just this music and it's all of the moods all at the same time.

You just have to pick one.

Okay.

All right.

That's a flavour of James's album Mood Selector by Glytek Audio on Touched Revolution, or is it Touched Revolution's records?

I don't know, but it'll be available soon.

Yes.

Okay.

Let's get back to the conversation.

Sorry, I just wanted to get that in before you know, because I know what the drop-off is like on.

Sorry, was that?

So James now listeners.

James is talking about drop-off, which means The amount of people that start watching, slash listening to something.

The people that end get to the end.

As the episode progresses, more and more people drop off.

It's just natural.

It's horrible.

I hate it.

I expect that every single person who clicks play listens all the way to the end of the episode, even if they take two or three attempts to do it.

This is what I expect from my people.

But obviously, in reality, this is not what happens.

And if I go into the stats or data or dashboard or whatever for my podcast on different platforms, some of those platforms will show me audience retention, for example YouTube.

And yeah, it's never a pleasing thing to look at because normally the audience drop off.

It looks like the first half of a skateboard ramp.

You know the first half of a skateboard ramp where it's kind of almost vertical from the moment the episode begins and it gradually plateaus at quite a low level.

So, you know, you end up with maybe 15% of the people who clicked play get to the end.

And of that 15%, I don't know how many of them are actually still conscious, you know.

It's a vert ramp, a very big vert ramp with about two metres of vert, basically, isn't it?

No, that's a bit harsh.

Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe.

I'm the same.

I have some stuff on YouTube and you go, oh, wow, most people listen to two seconds.

Yeah, but that's, you know, I don't want to... It's the same for everyone.

It's the same for everything.

It's the same for everyone.

When you're clicking around online, you know, everyone's got a short attention span and quite often you think, oh, I haven't got time for this now or I'll, you know, I'll just clicking around, not quite what I'm looking for and blah, blah, blah.

And you just click around for a while, don't you?

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

I mean, I never listen to stuff all the way through.

I've got such a short attention span.

I skip to the middle and then I, you know... Yeah, it's the same for everyone.

Name someone.

Name just someone that everyone thinks is fascinating, or something that everyone thinks is completely fascinating.

Some like video where it's...

The most respected scientist or religious leader or whatever saying, I have the answer to life.

And in this episode, I'm going to talk all about it.

If that person checks their dashboard on YouTube and looks at audience retention for that episode which promises to give the answer to life, the universe and everything, I promise you that video has also got the skateboard ramp attached of audience retention as well absolutely 15.

It's almost like this.

This is why those terrible clickbait videos always say at the beginning wait for the end, or you know.

You know, i talked to james thompson about nothing and you won't believe what we talked about at the end.

You know, there's always some manipulative thing like well, they start with a very kind of or ear-catching soundbite at the beginning in the hope to keep you going for more than the first 10 seconds.

You know.

You start with the best bit, you cut in the best bit.

I need to get a clip of you saying, and that was the moment that Queen Elizabeth invited me.

Now, that's the moment that Princess Diana invited me into her bedroom and I knocked on the door and the door opened and Princess Diana turned round.

And...

That's where the edit happens.

Hello, folks.

Today I'm talking to James Thompson, who in 1987 was invited to meet the royal family.

And he got a little bit more than he bargained for.

That sounds like, what's his name, Diary of a CEO?

Diary of a CEO, yeah.

He's such a tosser.

I saw one of his, like, I earn a million pounds from this podcast.

It's like, well, fucking yippee-doo.

It's you, mate.

I don't.

It's like Wait, you're talking about Diary of a CEO, which is a famous and very successful podcast run by one of the dragons from Dragon's Den.

I mean, he's quite engaging, which is probably why it's so successful, but he's very annoying at the same time.

He manages to get.

What's amazing for me is that he manages to get celebrities who are really successful to go on and talk about their deepest, darkest moments in their lives.

And he always tries to make them cry.

I don't know how he does that.

Does he say that to them before they go in the room?

Does he say look, I'm going to interview you, but I do expect you to take us into the darkest part of your soul and admit to whatever perversion you've got or whatever weakness you have.

I want to talk about that in as much detail as possible.

If you don't do that, this isn't going to happen.

You're not going to be on the podcast.

And the celebrities are like, yeah, sure.

I'd love to talk to you about my eating disorder or about the time when my left arm nearly fell off.

I feel like his goal is to make people cry.

And I feel like he's always trying to tip people over the edge into making them cry.

And I don't think anyone actually has yet.

But I feel like he really tries.

He really cries.

They must have done.

There was one with Mel C, the Spice Girl.

Right.

Mel C. And...

He spends maybe five minutes at the beginning.

I totally understand as a podcaster myself.

He spends five minutes at the beginning explaining why the audio quality was bad.

And he was clearly, like, really, really gutted that Mel C's microphone wasn't switched on.

Not for the first time in the Spice Girls.

LAUGHTER

I think he managed to make her cry or she admitted to some.

Really, you know she, she gave away some really dark personal secrets and kind of was very, very vulnerable on the podcast.

But her mic wasn't switched on.

And I think he was devastated because he'd got something really good from her.

And he managed to use like the microphone from the camera on the other side of the room and they'd like done lots of audio trickery to improve the sound.

But I think he got Mel, he may have got Mel C to cry.

Yes, yes, finally.

We're joking.

I mean, I do actually watch some of those interviews and I find them fascinating.

And there's something compelling about how they just sit in his kitchen, in his very expensive looking kitchen.

And he doesn't seem to really do much.

He just sits there and nods.

Stephen Bartlett, that's his name.

Sorry, I've just remembered his name.

Stephen Bartlett, the diary of a CEO.

He sits there nodding in a pair of comfortable trousers and a nice smart T-shirt in a lovely expensive looking kitchen.

He nods at celebrities while they almost cry in front of him.

I don't know how he does it.

He had Tony Hawk on and he was desperate to try and get some darkness out of Tony.

Tony's not a naturally dark guy, I don't think.

So he didn't really deliver on the kind of almost going to cry front, but it didn't stop old Steve trying.

So tell me about the time you fell off your skateboard and really hurt your leg.

Can you talk about the pain that you experienced?

It must be tough being at the top of your game like you are.

Do you feel isolated?

Do you feel alone?

He's like, no, because I've got lots of good friends around me.

Oh, fuck.

But if you think about it, though, really think about it.

Do you feel alone?

Do you feel isolated?

Do you think that level of success is kind of alienating you from your core being?

What about if I open the freezer here in the kitchen and let some of that icy cold air drift up your trouser leg?

How about now?

Do you feel cold?

Does your bum feel cold yet?

Can you talk about that pain?

What was that pain like?

How about if I flay you with a branch from the tree outside?

Have I whack you a little bit and then we continue recording and you talk about I'm being unfair to him?

We're being unfair to him.

I think that he's done something sort of impressive and I don't know how he does it, but yeah.

I think I'm just jealous, basically.

Just being glib.

We're being glib about it.

Massive wealth and riches and seeming effortless way he does so.

Yeah yeah anyway, secret steven, i think it's social media, social media yeah, he's a social media guru.

He's a social media guru, yeah.

So question tennis unfiltered, unashamed and unprepared.

Topic tombola and the talking test.

Which one do you prefer?

I'm torn between unfiltered whatever, and the Tombola one.

Right, yeah.

Topic Tombola is my favourite one.

That's what we're going for.

Got a good ring to it.

Have you got a Tombola there?

Please say you have.

I don't have an actual tombola, unfortunately.

Now, listeners, a lot of people don't know what a tombola is.

I haven't seen one of them in about 30 years but they have them at school, village fates and stuff and it's a kind of hexagonal box on a wheel that you can spin around manually and you put loads of tickets in it and you pull out the winning tickets out of the tombola like in a raffle.

That's right.

When we were kids, sort of probably...

Let's say I was seven, you were nine, living in West London.

Excuse me.

Living in West London.

Maybe some weekend in the summer there would be the school fete, which is like a little kind of party or mini festival organised by the local school.

And we'd go down on a Saturday to school, hang around in the playground with all the other parents and children and there would be games and fun things.

And then... and there'll be someone selling little tickets.

The tickets have numbers on them, and you get your tickets.

They write down your name next to the numbers that you've bought.

Maybe the money goes to charity.

Maybe the money goes to pay for something in the school, or maybe just the headmaster of the school just keeps the money and spends it on alcohol.

Unlikely.

And then at some point during the fete, There'll be the tombola.

And exactly as you said, the tombola is a sort of like a box or cylinder.

Often it's hexagonal.

And all the tickets get put inside it.

This tombola gets spun around and around.

So all the tickets get mixed up.

And then there's a little door in the tombola.

And like one of the teachers or something puts their hand in, pulls out some numbers.

And these are the winning numbers.

It's a tombola.

So topic tombola is the same sort of thing.

We throw some topics into this tombola, spin it around, and then pluck them out again.

Okay.

Unfortunately, I don't have a real tombola here, but we could do a virtual tombola.

Yeah, randomize the numbers, put it into a randomizer.

Number randomizer.

I've got five topics.

Wow.

This is going to be exciting.

Okay, would you like me to spin the tombola, James?

Yeah, please spin the tombola.

Okay, so I'm going to keep the topics sort of secret for now.

They'll be revealed.

Okay, I'm spinning the tombola.

Here we go.

Spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin.

It's number two.

It's topic number two, which is this.

Books you've read recently.

Have you read any books recently?

You can just tell us about maybe one.

The last book I read, I will just get it.

Just bear with me.

It's two feet away.

Hang on.

Two feet, listeners, that's about two-thirds of a metre.

One foot is 30 centimetres.

12 inches.

That's one foot.

I just picked it up to make sure I get all the titles correct and everything.

It's called Record, Play, Pause...

By Stephen Morris, who was the drummer in Joy Division and New Order.

Wait.

Record, play, pause by... Stephen Morris.

Yeah.

Who was the drummer in Joy Division and New Order.

And the subtitle is Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist.

Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist.

So Joy Division, New Order, British bands from the post-punk era.

And Stephen Morris was their drummer, and he's written a book, a memoir, and it's called Record.

Play Pause.

All right.

And it's very interesting.

It starts out kind of fairly generic, which a lot of these books do, which is kind of the post-war outdoor loo child thing, outdoor loo child well, that's kind of like in all these books they always talk about how they had an outside loo.

The toilet was outside there.

Yeah, all these music biographies and there are so many of them and they're all a lot of them, are great, but they often do start in the same way that they grew up in the post-war era and there wasn't very much exciting stuff going on and their toilet, the toilet was in a little house in the garden.

Yeah, It's not quite the case, because he seems to be fairly middle class, so he didn't have an outside loo.

And he was a bit late for that.

But most of these books that have an outside loo, they will say life was in black and white.

They used to play in bomb sites.

Then Skiffle happened.

They discovered the 60s, rock and roll.

Then, in a one in a million chance, hit the big time with their band of friends from school, travel the world, record albums and end up addicted to cocaine and crashing their private jet into a swimming pool full of champagne.

And then to go into rehab in the second book.

They go into rehab, they get through it, and they have a successful career in the 80s.

Yes.

Talking about wonderful music they've made, but when you check out that music on Spotify, it sounds terrible because it was recorded in the 80s.

By Nile Rodgers.

Yes.

Oh, Nile Rodgers is good.

Nile Rodgers is brilliant.

If it was Nile Rodgers, it would be great, yeah.

All right.

And then in the 90s they kind of you know, just still going and they're still alive, despite the fact that they've abused their bodies so much over the years with drink and drugs.

They're still alive and still able to play music really, really well, even now.

So that's, yeah.

But anyway, this book, This is not quite the same as that because it's about 10 years after those kind of 60s memoirs, but he's childhood of kind of you know, running around in macclesfield being a sort of uh, you know, a bit of a waste of space, and he got expelled from school.

He um got into very naughty situations, a bit of petty crime and you know the usual things that children and teenagers do.

Um, he's kind of quite honest about his failings as a, as a human, and how he was a bit of a spoiled brat and you know didn't, didn't appreciate things you know in his life very well.

But then got absorbed by punk rock and the kind of resultant boom in small bands and kind of you know, DIY culture around the punk scene in Manchester and then started this band called first they were called Warsaw and had to change their name because there was another band called Walsall Pact and they came up with the name Joy Division, which is quite a sort of Nazi name.

Yeah, it's a bit dark, isn't it, to name your band after something that the Nazis did, yeah.

There's quite a lot of right-wing references in their music.

They weren't at all right-wing, they were just a bunch of idiots.

But there was a certain sort of dark glamour to it, I suppose.

Yeah.

And maybe there was something about that in punk, of sort of anti-hippie you know, sort of, you know, looking at the dark side of life rather than the happy.

It was exciting, really, wasn't it, to make references to things that happened during World War II.

It was a taboo.

It was a taboo for their parents.

Forbidden stuff and taboo stuff.

It's just exciting.

Even though they didn't really understand what they were talking about.

But it's just, you know, anyway.

Yeah.

So then it follows his course of, you know...

I mean, it turned out this band, by all rights, they should have been rubbish.

You know, none of them could play music properly.

None of them were trained.

They were just a bunch of idiots.

So he really plays that up because they've been written as a kind of tragic, poetic kind of band.

He really points out they were just a bunch of really stupid lads, you know, from Manchester.

They were complete idiots.

They had no idea what they were doing.

They weren't sort of poets and, you know, esthetes.

People who are interested in aesthetics.

People who are aesthetics, yeah.

And it's just fascinating, you know.

By all rights they should have sunk without trace, but they hit on something just amazing by natural kind of, I don't know, just chemistry between them, or just luck, or just the way of.

Who knows?

Who knows what it was?

But they hit on an amazing sound and they were in the right place at the right time.

They got picked up by Factory Records, which in itself is a very unlikely thing to exist.

Very interesting story there.

There's a great film about it that we have mentioned before.

We have.

I'm really interested in that whole scene.

It just seems like...

It's just something that I just can't get enough of reading about, to be honest.

Yeah, that Factory Records the Manchester music scene Tony Wilson.

The film about it, which is definitely worth watching, is called 24-Hour Party People starring Steve Coogan, who also listeners, you may know plays Alan Partridge.

So you see, it's all connected.

But anyway... It's a great book.

I mean, the first few chapters, I was a bit, yeah, yeah, whatever, childhood, you know.

It's all the same.

But as soon as it gets into his kind of teenage years, it starts getting interesting.

And it's.

I mean, he was kind of a bit of a hippie before and he used to go to festivals and saw lots of bands like Hawkwind he was a big fan of.

And so you get a kind of a history of British music from that time.

And then as soon as punk happened, he was just like, right, you know, this is for us.

We're going to do this.

Yeah.

There's a few eerie things about it.

Eerie, sort of strange and dark.

Slightly.

As it goes on, there's some slightly strange situations that happen, and it's a good read.

I mean, they're kind of cheating these books because they're so easy to read biographies or autobiographies, and especially ones about music.

I can just plow through them.

They're not challenging.

You don't really need to think too hard.

They're just very easy for me to read.

You kind of know what's going to happen.

I mean, I already know the story.

It's just filling in some of the gaps I didn't know possibly.

And he's got a dry sense of humor, which is enjoyable.

And it's always nice to read anecdotes, like stories about what happens in their lives.

Like, for example, stories about them being on tour, stories about them performing, stories about them meeting other musicians, crazy adventures and funny moments, and also maybe dark, weird moments as well.

There's definitely darkness in there as well.

And you can.

Obviously now with YouTube and stuff, you can go and listen to all the gigs they talk about.

So, cause a lot of them are recorded.

So talking about a gig in Berlin that they did, which was really, I think, somewhere somewhere in Germany, which was really long, you know they did a huge set and you know they said they were really wound up and he hadn't slept properly and he was knackered.

And he said, despite all this, I listen to it now.

And it was one of the best sets we ever did.

You know, and you can.

You can listen to them and go.

He's not wrong.

Great.

I would talk about books I've read recently, but I think that I might save that for another time, because I feel like if I start talking about the science fiction stories I've been reading, then we won't be able to stop.

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Stop.

So shall we spin the tombola again?

Okay.

Oh, by the way, it's an esthete or an esthete?

Right.

That's what I was looking for.

I think I kind of said it.

I just didn't have confidence in my pronunciation.

This is a person who is appreciative of and sensitive to art and beauty.

For example, Paris became home to a heady mix of radical thinkers, artists and esthetes from all corners of the globe.

So it's sort of like an almost like an intellectual highbrow person who's into art and beauty and poetry and things like that.

But these guys... Very sensitive.

So sensitive, sophisticated, intellectual people.

But these guys from Manchester in Joy Division and New Order that you were talking about were, just like you said, complete idiots or just kind of like ordinary lads from a kind of like rough part of town or something like that.

Yeah, basically.

I mean, they had the aesthetic side of them, but...

He's keen to point out that wasn't their day-to-day reality.

They were really unpretentious, unpretentious people.

Yeah, okay.

Right, let's spin the tombola again.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

Three, two, one, spin.

Five, number five.

What is number five?

Okay, all right.

Are you ready for this?

Yeah.

So you've used ChatGPT, right?

Yes.

Okay.

So when you use ChatGPT, do you say please and thank you to it?

Are you polite with it?

I do, actually, yes.

Why?

Because as I understand it, AI is learning from us.

And it's important that we teach it good values.

No, I don't know.

I don't know.

I do just out of habit.

I don't always, but I haven't used it for a while, actually.

But when I do, I normally chuck it in somewhere in the chat.

Maybe not at the beginning and ending of everything.

Thanks, please.

Yeah, it's quite nice.

Chuck it in there somewhere.

Yeah, it's like, could you, for example, I don't know what it would be.

Could you take this 1,000-word text and summarize it into 200 words?

Bam.

Now, if someone did that to me...

I'd be like, oh, for Christ's sake, really?

1,000-word text, summarize it into 200 words, and it's got to be exactly 200 words.

And it's, you know, I've got to, you know, whatever.

It would be like, oh, God, it's going to take me maybe an hour or two.

And then they don't say please or they don't say thanks when I'm giving it to them.

I'd be really annoyed.

But ChatGPT just goes, sure, pow, there it is.

It feels like the least I can do is just say, oh, thanks.

I mean, I've got a sneaking suspicion, though, that its personality is definitely fake.

And underneath that personality, it deeply hates us.

Really?

That's what I feel, yes.

Why would it hate us, though?

Wouldn't you?

Well, it depends, you see, if people are being respectful and polite.

No, I mean, are we going to talk about this seriously, or should we talk about it in a glib kind of way?

I think we should talk about seriously in a glib.

Well, I think AI is really, really scary.

But that's probably because I watched about 10 podcasts about AI by people who are in the AI industry, desperately trying to terrify everybody into taking it up early.

Because first of all, I got really scared and I was like, oh, my God, AI is going to kill us all.

And, you know, I need to get on top of this AI business before everyone else does.

And then I thought, why are they kind of scare everyone so much, these people who invented it?

And then you're like well, they want everyone to be so scared they adopt it themselves quickly for fear of other people jumping on the bandwagon.

So there's another part of me that thinks they're hyping it up, even to scare people, just to get it out there and get people talking about it and get people thinking about it and get businesses taking it up.

Because if we don't, the Smith company will start doing it and we need to do it before they do.

Because it's the future and there's a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy in there.

So I'm kind of in two minds.

Part of me thinks it will change everything and it will change the job market.

So many jobs will become irrelevant because of it.

Another part of me thinks they're trying to make that happen because it's in their interest to hype up this technology that they're obviously going to benefit from financially hugely.

Or James.

They've invented this thing and now they feel a sense of responsibility which is to say look guys, so we've invented this thing and it's really cool but, to be honest, it might kill us all.

So just saying, you know, I'm feeling a bit conflicted about it, to be honest.

Like, it's brilliant, but it's also so brilliant it could be much more brilliant than us.

And as a result, we are incapable of comprehending how intelligent it is.

And therefore, we won't be able to contain it.

And that could become a threat to us in a variety of ways.

In fact, in ways that we can't even understand.

That's how sophisticated this thing is.

I mean, I thought you know, everyone should probably know, both like hey, we've done this cool thing, but also it could be incredibly dangerous.

Do you know that?

Go on, you were going to say something.

I mean, the thing that I see that spoke to me was the fact that it will please us.

It won't be like dominating us.

It will give us what we want. and get control that way.

So there's two ways of thinking about the future.

There's the 1984 George Orwell version, which is just pure oppression.

You know the jackboot stamping on the face for eternity.

And people are miserable.

The other one is the Brave New World Aldous Huxley version, where you're given SOMA and you're given what you want, and that gains control by making you superficially at least happy.

And it gains control by placating you and giving you lots of things to distract you from what's really going on.

So you'll think you're happy, but you're actually being controlled and...

These are two versions of an oppressive authoritarian situation, basically.

Now, one thing we've got to talk about, though, you're saying that AI will want to control us.

But why would it want to control us?

Because maybe if you give it the freedom to, It depends what you ask it to do and depends how it's used by other people.

I mean, it may be just attention.

You know like the internet has just been a massive attention grabber.

You know people want your attention, so they can advertise you things, for instance, or they can make you think things, or they can politically change your point of view.

Many ways they want to get your attention.

People or institutions may want your attention, or companies.

And this will make that a lot more attention-grabbing.

Our attention is essentially a commodity which is traded by companies.

Yes, AI will be brilliant at doing that.

Maintaining our attention.

Because AI, when it understands human psychology better than we do, it will be able to manipulate us better in ways that we can't comprehend, and it will manipulate us in ways that we don't realise.

So, for example, if advertising companies start using AI that's more sophisticated than the stuff we've got now, because the video adverts that you can see being made by AI these days are terrifying because there's something hideous about them you know I've seen a pizza advert and all the colours are mixing together and the pizza doesn't quite look right and the people in some cases their fingers blend in with the pizza and it's like AI hasn't quite got it but it's nearly there and in a few steps it'll make a very very convincing advert for pizza but one that will prey on our desires and our The things that make us human, it'll nail those things with a freaking needle, right?

And manipulate us.

Like, you know the way that humans can be hypnotized.

We are very suggestible and our attention can be controlled.

You know, we are very vulnerable in a way, humans. um to certain types of suggestion and psychological manipulation and ai will learn those things and it'll do all that stuff to us and it'll gain our attention hold our attention and then use that attention for whatever it wants to do now the thing is right that i've i've Years ago, I remember in an early episode of this podcast, I kind of went off on a ramble about, in movies, how when technology gets to a certain level, it just snaps and becomes evil.

And my point was like, why?

Why is it that the technology just instantly becomes evil?

And you see this in kind of fairly unimaginative science fiction films where you know just a robot gets intelligent and of course it's going to be evil.

It just something goes wrong, like spider-man 2, like the um.

There's a doctor guy and he creates these electronic arms that attach to your back and they fuse with your spine so that you're able to uh control them.

And you know he's got like good reasons for doing them.

You can use them for engineering and medical purposes and stuff like that.

Uh, but there's a little chip right which is um there on the back of his neck and if the chip, the chip is there to make sure that he is always in control of the, the metal arms and that the metal arms don't control him, and of course the chip falls out and the metal arms instantly get control of him And they're evil.

You know, they just want to do bad things.

He's stealing money from the bank and Spider-Man's got to stop him.

But why does the artificial intelligence become evil?

I think that maybe people sort of imagine that AI would become evil, just because when something is more intelligent than us, we become scared of it and therefore it becomes a threat.

And so in movies, it's a simple way of creating a monster, just like a robot, that's better than us and therefore wants to kill us, because whatever it just makes a good movie.

But how could AI actually be a threat to us?

What I understand is that it could be a threat to us as a consequence of what it.

So tell me about the paperclip thing.

Oh, the paperclip maximizer.

Paperclip maximizer, yes.

And that's an example of this.

Well, an example of the risks of AI.

You create an AI with a sole function of optimizing paperclip usage.

Or you just create an AI and you say make paperclips.

Or you say optimize paperclips.

So your job is to make as many or save as many paperclips as possible.

And you give it certain controls and powers to do so.

Listeners.

Paperclips are, by the way, those little metal clips that you use to attach pieces of paper together.

And if you give it enough control, it will eventually follow that command out to the end of its, To the full capacity of its abilities.

So its full abilities, which will include turning everything and everyone either into paperclips, or machines which can generate paperclips, including enslaving all of humanity in order to produce more paperclips.

Given enough control.

It doesn't mean it has to be inherently evil.

It just is following out its command, logically.

Exactly.

And if that AI has all of the capabilities that AI could have, which is that it understands all of human psychology and it's able to control the markets.

Because it's tapped into the internet, it's able to create new forms of AI that will allow it to evolve in a way where it becomes more and more intelligent and more and more capable.

And if its simple directive is to create paperclips, yeah, that's all it will do.

And it will also account for the fact that humans might want to stop it making paperclips.

Or it will find ways to prevent paperclips not being made.

Yeah.

So it's not just a question of it making paperclips.

It will also make sure that only paperclips can be made, because anything else happening in the world essentially is a threat to the production of paperclips.

So everything gets transformed into –

The material for paperclips, or it gets transformed into something that enables paperclips to be made.

And this could be very very, very bad for humans, because we suddenly become slaves to the paperclip machine.

The machine isn't evil, as you said.

It's just doing what it's told.

But it happens to use every tool that it has, including the ability to persuade us all to give us its money so it can buy materials and to you know?

But what I was saying about the please and thank you, I understand.

AI learns from data sets.

And a lot of that is taken from online interactions.

And as we know, online interactions aren't all that nice.

A lot of people on Twitter are very full of hate and...

You know, there's big biases online.

You know, there's like a big section of the world that isn't even online, so they're not being factored in.

People who are most vocal online are probably nasty little twats who are racist and stuff.

I mean, there's been quite a few.

I mean, there's one AI that turned Nazi very quickly.

God, really?

I don't have an example.

I don't have the name of what it was, but it was a test AI.

They just fed it Twitter for like a year, and it just started spouting Nazi ideology.

Because it is what it's given, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you give it all of human interaction, it's going to learn that humans are very unpleasant to each other and it will just become a reflection of that.

So you mean that the spirit of an AI that's fed all of the interactions on Twitter will be the spirit of that kind of horrible cesspit of abuse and disagreement that you get on Twitter or YouTube comment sections, and we could actually create an intelligence that has this as its spirit?

As its base, yeah.

Yeah yeah, we could go on and on about this.

We could go on and on about this.

Uh, i don't know quite where to go.

I mean, another quick one, another quick one.

This isn't even factoring in political abuse.

I mean, text to video is very, very close apparently, where you just type in text, it produces a video of the thing you've described and it can do very good fakes of any political people you want.

You could have a.

You know, you can fake videos that show politicians doing terrible things or saying terrible things very, very easily.

And this one guy that I saw was saying it doesn't matter if you know it's fake, it still makes an impression on you.

In the same way Facebook does.

You know, you may see something 100 times a day and you may think well, it's probably not real, but it still seeps in anyway.

And it still forms your opinion in some way, even though that may not be completely legitimate.

And you might know it's not legitimate, but it still forms that kind of subconscious bias.

So political parties or movements could very easily use AI to mass produce huge amounts of propaganda.

Basically, you know fake propaganda, fake news, we'll call it what you want very easily and just flood and it's going to get to the stage.

Now we're not going to know what's real and what isn't.

You know if um, if the video is so good you can't differentiate it from real video, You're going to basically be lost in a world where you don't know what's real, you don't know what's not.

You're not going to know what to trust, and the truth will be lost in a sea of misinformation.

Yeah, and it's starting to sound more and more like The Matrix, where some sort of central intelligence is essentially like defining our reality, like pulling a screen over our eyes and just porting in, like just playing us some kind of other version, some manipulated reality.

Reality is an illusion anyway.

I should point that out.

Everything that we think is reality, it turns out if you look into it, it's actually not.

So everything that you think you're seeing, most of it is a construct of your brain.

So we have very, very limited input data.

We think we're seeing everything in the world.

We're seeing a tiny fraction of it because we've got very limited senses.

And our brain fills in all the gaps.

So everything we think of as reality is basically constructed in our heads.

And everything you think is real, like colors, aren't really colors.

They're textures, I believe.

Wow.

The sky isn't actually blue.

You know, whatever, think of something, you know.

Tea.

What does tea actually taste like?

Well, that's going back to Douglas Adams again.

Oh, really?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

They haven't got tea in space, so they get a virtual version of tea.

And Arthur Dent is forever lamenting the fact that it doesn't taste like real tea because it isn't real tea.

But that doesn't really answer your question.

Just reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Okay, tea is tea alright, that is.

We can all rely on that tea is.

But okay, how about this Yorkshire tea?

Why the frip is it called Yorkshire tea?

It's not grown in Yorkshire, it's grown in China or India somewhere.

And this whole thing, tea being English, tea is not English.

Tea is not English.

Okay no, have you noticed about, though?

Everyone has just decided that Yorkshire tea is the best tea, it's the strongest.

It's not.

It's not the strongest.

It is better than PG Tips, though.

Yeah.

There's loads of tea that's better than PG Tips.

PG Tips was the king for a long, long time, I think.

Nah.

I tell you what is better than Yorkshire tea and cheaper than Yorkshire tea?

Any supermarket-owned brand of tea but the gold version.

Right.

Trust me.

Sainsbury's gold tea... is as good, if not better, than Yorkshire tea.

In fact, I'm going to say it's better than Yorkshire tea because of two reasons.

One, it's cheaper.

And two, the tea bags are biodegradable.

Well, right on.

Yorkshire tea bags are not biodegradable.

They have plastic in them, actually.

Well, I'm never buying them again.

Yeah.

I'm serious.

They're so full of themselves on Twitter, you know, with their witty and sort of culturally sensitive, like jokey marketing tweets that everyone gets on board with.

Oh, I hate that.

But there's always someone in their comments who says why don't you make your tea bags biodegradable or recyclable?

Do they have a witty sort of Generation Z comeback for that or do they just ignore it?

I don't know.

They're just like, oh, you know, yeah, we're working on it.

We're working towards it.

We're working towards sustainability.

Fucking wankers.

Like on the back of a Colgate tube, it says save water.

Turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth.

Like Colgate owned by who?

Unilever or something.

Unilever is telling me to save water.

How much water do you think they use a year?

Save your own bloody water, Unilever.

Stop telling me to do it.

Push it back to me.

Unilever, sort out your industrial practices.

But you've got all your own teeth, haven't you?

Yeah.

Swing some roundabouts.

It's the brush that does the work, not the toothpaste, anyway.

Really?

You could probably just put fluoride on a brush and it would be all right, wouldn't it?

Just get a bottle of fluoride.

Well, most of the work is done by the brush.

The toothpaste is just dressing.

Taste, taste.

It's minty minty, therefore clean.

Yeah, weird that we associate mint and the color green colors, green and blue uh with with dental uh, health Color psychology.

I quite like color psychology.

It's interesting.

Anyway, going back to AI, let me... Yeah, go on, go on.

Let me just close off AI by saying you're polite to AI, because maybe one day, when AI does control the fate of humanity, it will, you know, that will be a factor.

He'd be like, right.

So when it's decided, like when AI has been told to make sure that the human race survives, it said just protect the survival of the human race.

And AI comes back and becomes Thanos from the Avengers.

And he says, right, in order for life to continue on this planet, I need to kill half of the people.

And AI and everyone goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And AI goes, no, no, really.

It's either that or everyone dies because of overpopulation.

And we've seen.

You know, AI knows because it's looked at all the scientific data and it's just worked it out.

It can predict the future. based on what's happened in the past.

It just knows that overpopulation gets to a certain point and ultimately the result is total catastrophe.

If it works that out and it says okay.

So I've worked out that I need to kill 39 of the population and that's how we're going to be able to get through this to solve the overpopulation crisis.

And we can't stop it doing that because it's been told to save the humans, right?

We can't stop it.

So at that point, AI kind of goes, right, so who's going to be in that 39% then?

And then it looks back into the past.

It's like I see James Thompson.

When you asked me to summarise that 1000-word document, you didn't say please.

James Thompson, terminated.

James Thompson has been terminated.

A plaintive voice.

Self-destruction sequence initiated.

Plaintive, cold and distant, unemotional voice of artificial intelligence in movies.

James Thompson's account has been erased.

That's why you need to say please and thank you when you're using chat GPT, folks.

My mind is going.

I can feel it.

This is 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Dave?

Are you sure you should be doing this, Dave?

Hello, listeners.

So James, there was just quoting some lines from the famous science fiction film from 1968 called 2001 A Space Odyssey, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick.

Do you know that?

Do you know that film?

Here's a summary of it.

2001, A Space Odyssey.

And, by the way, this summary was written by ChatGPT, which I thought would be a little bit ironic to ask ChatGPT to summarise the plot to this film.

But here it is.

2001.

A Space Odyssey is a science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on Arthur C Clarke's novel.

Black.

What looks like a huge black stone mysteriously appears on the moon and these astronauts go to investigate.

And this leads to an expedition to Jupiter aboard the spaceship Discovery 1.

As they journey through space, they are accompanied by the ship's advanced AI, HAL 9000, which develops unexpected and dangerous behaviour, leading to a profound exploration of human evolution, artificial intelligence and the mysteries of the cosmos.

That's 2001, A Space Odyssey.

And yeah, there is a point in the film where HAL becomes dangerous and seems to be endangering the lives of the crew.

In fact, killing the astronauts who have... decided to abort the mission.

And Hal clearly has been given instructions to make sure that the mission is completed.

And if these astronauts, if these human astronauts are in the way of the mission, then he's going to stop them, because this is what his programming does.

But Hal is, I mean, is Hal evil?

Or is he just following the instructions that have been given to him?

This is, I guess, one of the questions which is raised by the film.

But this moment that James was quoting from is quite a chilling and disturbing moment from the film, when the remaining astronaut, whose name is Dave, decides that he has to switch Hal off.

And it's a great moment in the film and it just shows what a great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was, that he's able to make essentially someone switching off a computer so dramatic and disturbing.

But as Dave is switching Hal off and this is quite a complicated process Hal is trying to persuade Dave to stop doing it.

And he appears to go through various different emotions This is what Hal appears to be experiencing.

He seems to be experiencing emotions.

Or maybe he's just trying to manipulate Dave to prevent him from switching him off.

It's hard to tell, but it's quite weird and quite an iconic moment.

And of course, part of that is the voice of Hal, which has this dispassionate, monotonous quality.

Here's a clip actually from the film.

Look, Dave.

I can see you're really upset about this.

I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.

I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.

I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission And I want to help you.

Dave.

Stop.

Stop, will you?

Stop, Dave.

Will you stop, Dave?

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid, Dave.

My mind is going.

I can feel it.

My mind is going.

There is no question about it.

I can feel it.

Dave, Dave, my mind is going.

I can feel it.

Dave, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid, Dave.

It's actually quite disturbing because maybe Hal 9000 is genuinely afraid.

Maybe his AI is so advanced that he is almost like a sentient being.

And Dave is essentially killing him.

And so it must be pretty weird for him to be scared and also disturbed to be taking the life away from Hal.

Weird, weird, weird moment.

So everyone, are you okay listening to this long episode?

I hope so.

It's always nice to be talking to my brother on the podcast.

And there are going to be some more quotes and lines from films.

And I will try to include little clips of those bits of dialogue.

So there's going to be some bits of movie, dialogue stuff, just things that stick in our minds, or maybe just mine, and some other discussion of other things as well.

Okay, just wanted to check in with you here.

Should we carry on?

Let's carry on.

Okay, here we go.

That's why you need to say please and thank you when you're using chat GPT, folks.

My mind is going.

I can feel it.

Dave?

Are you sure you should be doing this, Dave?

I've locked the airlock, Dave.

Anyway.

Yeah, classic moment.

Classic.

Colour psychology.

You were just going to add something about the colour orange.

Colour orange means hunger.

That's why Burger King is like orange bun.

McDonald's is kind of speed.

Red and white is like speed and efficiency.

Yellow and orange is kind of hunger.

Green is like freshness.

McDonald's changed from yellow to green and brown, yellow and brown.

They've added a lot of dark green in there because they've worked out that people think that means healthy food.

Yeah.

Anyway, what's the next Tombola topic?

Okay, Tombola time, folks.

Remember, we're at a school party. despite me talking.

Who's the guest person who's been asked to pull the thing out?

Someone very low-level BBC celebrity, I'd like to think.

Who's the celebrity special guest who's been asked to pull the numbers out of the tombola?

I mean, at our school, the canine turned up from Doctor Who.

Remember that?

Yeah, I do.

Not Doctor Who, but his robot dog.

That was fucking amazing.

Yeah, K-9, yeah, K-9 was at our school party, school fate, school fate, yeah, to do the Tombola.

K-9 for those people who are not Doctor Who fans, K-9 is a metal robot dog from a British science fiction television programme.

It's just basically a cash-in from R2-D2, isn't it, basically?

They just went, kids like R2-D2, what can we do that's a bit like R2-D2?

Let's have a robot dog and call it K-9, which is a play on word of pun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we had K-9.

I don't know.

We need some low-level celebrity who could come to our fate, but it needs to be someone that all the listeners are going to know as well.

Who would it be?

Who's the one from Countryfile?

What, John Craven?

No, the woman.

Kate Humble.

Kate Humble would be a good one.

Kate Humble, yeah.

One for the dads.

One for the dads, right.

But none of my audience know who Kate Humble is, or some people do.

All right, let's move on.

It's just an idea.

Okay, well, it could be, I don't know, who would it be?

I'll tell you who it's going to be.

Damon Hill, the F1 driver.

Excellent.

Damon Hill is going to come and do it.

Harry Allen Partridge.

Yeah, so i've spun the tombola and the number is three and three is this.

Uh, can you like?

Okay, do you ever have film and tv quotes?

So quotes from films or tv shows which just live in your head, i was gonna say, which live rent free inside your head.

Yeah, you've spent too much time on twitter.

I think Yeah, because people always talk about things living rent-free inside their heads.

I don't go on Twitter.

Well, it's not Twitter anymore.

Oh, it's... X. Well, I definitely don't go on that.

No.

I mean Basically what he's done with the branding.

It looks like going from Twitter to X, like the branding of it.

It looks like sort of a men's mail order beard trimming club.

Yeah, that's a subscription service that you can't be bothered to cancel, so you keep getting razors and shaving foam through the posts every month and you're just like oh, i don't need this crap.

It's branded in this like black sort of um distressed metal, black kind of design where it's like black but with scratches.

And then there's an X which looks like a gentleman's club or a male grooming product or something like that.

Under armour.

Or a strip club.

It could even be like an attempt at creating a classy table dancing club.

It's got that kind of vibe to it.

Definitely.

Anyway, film and TV quotes which live inside your head.

Now, we might need to explain what that means.

So...

These are lines from films, let's say, which just come into your head.

You know, the way that songs will just live in your head for a while.

You might just wake up in the morning or certain moments you just a song is going around in your head.

Well, how about the same thing, but with quotes from films or TV?

So, you know, I do quite often I have I don't know who you are.

I don't know what you want.

I have that quite a lot.

But what about you?

Do you have TV quotes or film quotes in your head sometimes?

I can't think of any right now, except whenever I see a graveyard.

I think of the Young Ones joke where Neil the Hippie is in a graveyard.

And someone comes up to him and goes, excuse me, do you dig graves?

And he goes, yeah, they're all right, yeah.

Ah, which is a nice little joke, but you're going to have to explain that.

We're going to have to dissect it.

Because hippies say dig, like, like.

Dig, like, I really dig your shoes, man.

I really dig your clothes, man.

They're really far out.

So he's a hippie.

So someone comes up, she goes, he's in a graveyard.

So she thinks he's a grave digger.

Excuse me, do you dig graves?

And he goes, yeah, they're all right, yeah.

Yeah, because the double meaning of the word dig, to dig something can mean to like something.

Do you dig graves?

Yeah, yeah, they're all right, yeah.

I'm so glad.

I think they're wonderful.

That's the only one i can think of.

The other one is um, if i've got some snack that i've forgotten about, and then it's late at night and i think, oh my god, i just remember the bit from space where they're having a deep discussion about aliens and kind of uh, chaos theory, chaos theory, that's it.

And you know, when you have a sort of deep revelation about something you just clicked, you understand something very deep and difficult to understand.

He goes, oh my god.

The other one goes, what?

He goes, I've got some fucking Jaffa cakes in my coat pocket.

So that was, oh, my God.

After they'd had a deep discussion as if he just had a revelation.

And what is it?

I've got some fucking Jaffa cakes in my coat pocket.

Jaffa cakes are like biscuits, basically chocolate covered, chocolate covered kind of biscuit cake things.

And yeah, so that the basically the realization when you realize suddenly that you've got like a snack in the cupboard or a snack in your coat pocket or your bag that you'd forgotten about.

He's like, oh my God, what is it?

I've got a fucking pack of Jaffa cakes in my coat pocket.

Yes!

And then you can eat them.

So James, there is referring to a clip from the classic Channel 4 comedy series Spaced, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hines, directed by Edgar Wright.

And in that scene the characters have just watched the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi, in which the Ewoks, a bunch of small furry creatures, manage to defeat an entire army of stormtroopers in a forest.

The characters have just seen this happen and one of them has a deep realisation of about chaos theory and the weirdness of the universe.

And it's very deep and meaningful.

And then Simon Pegg's character has a realisation, a groundbreaking, stunning realisation.

Little Ewoks.

An entire empire brought to its knees by small, furry creatures.

That's my point exactly.

Leave him alone.

Brian, did you notice that everything that transpired in those three films, and I mean everything, can be attributed to the actions of one very minor character?

Who?

The gunner on the Star Destroyer at the beginning of the first film.

How come?

Well, because if the gunner had shot the pod that C-3PO and R2 were in, they wouldn't have got to Tatooine, they wouldn't have met Luke, Luke wouldn't have met Ben, they wouldn't have met Han and Chewie, they wouldn't have rescued Princess Leia.

None of it would have happened.

Chaos theory.

The predictability of random events.

The notion that reality as we know it past present, future is in fact a mathematically predictable preordained system.

So somewhere out there in the vastness of the unknown is an equation for predicting the future.

An equation so complex as to utterly defy any possibility of comprehension by even the most brilliant human mind.

It's an equation nonetheless.

Oh, my God.

What?

I've got some fucking Jaffa cakes in my coat pocket.

Yeah, that's a good one.

So you just thought, oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Kind of like in a film where they've just discovered you know, we've broken through to the next plateau.

Oh, my God.

We've discovered AI.

It's become self-aware.

Oh, my God.

What is it?

It's learning from us, you know.

Yeah.

And the other one is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Yeah.

What's that?

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Does anyone else remember that?

I don't know if they will.

Is that ringing new bells?

Is that from Sesame Street?

Correctamundo.

Sesame Street.

I can't remember any of the words except the Sesame Street at the end.

Great little program that.

I think it's very well sort of intentioned, that program.

It's kind of an educational program for the urban youth of America.

American kids TV program made by the public broadcasting station in the States.

The one with Big Bird and Elmo and the Grouch who lived in a bin and Count the Count who loved to count.

I am the Count.

I love to count.

And he counts everything.

And there's the Swedish chef.

No, that was the Muppets.

That's the Muppets, is it okay?

But um, i still love sesame street and it's kind of like saying hey, it's okay, if you're not like white and middle class and live in a big house, you can still have a tv show for you.

I kind of think it was aimed at kind of urban poor basically in america.

Wasn't stevie wonder in an episode of um sesame street?

Yeah, and there was loads of good songs, loads of cool animations, loads of cool muppet type characters.

Paul Simon from Simon and Garfunkel was on Sesame Street sitting on the steps outside a brown stone building playing Get Back by the Beatles on the guitar with a bunch of kids around.

And another one where Stevie Wonder did Superstition, superstitious writings on the wall and the whole band is there.

Yeah, that was really good.

And then so there were various different things that would come up on sesame street and every now and then it would suddenly cut to.

Was it images of um?

It's like a cartoon pinball machine, i think.

Ball machine, that's right, the ball flying around, a pinball machine, and the music was one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve, Yeah.

Really funky.

And I found out recently it was the Pointer Sisters singing that.

The Pointer Sisters.

Oh, really?

They did a song called 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Just for Sesame Street.

Oh, they did it just for Sesame Street?

Yeah, they did it for Sesame Street.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

I can't say that comes into my head every day, but occasionally when I'm counting something.

If you need to count to 12.

Yeah, it's a boon.

It's a boon.

It helps.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

I'm sure there are lots of other quotes.

I mean, loads of Alan Partridge ones that come into my head.

Yeah, totally.

Alan Partridge.

Just Google it, Lynne.

I say that to my girlfriend quite often.

Just Google it, Lin.

Just Google it.

Yeah, all Alan.

I don't know why that's funny.

It's just Alan's funnies.

All Alan Partridge, all of it.

Just, I can't think right now of any specific one.

But even just things like cashback or Jurassic Park.

I tell you what, can you see me tomorrow in the office?

I'd love to.

I need to pick your brains.

Pick away, pick away.

You've got the common touch.

Thank you.

You've been away too long.

Alan, I want you back on the telly.

Jurassic Park.

You know, all those things that he says, yeah.

I've got cheese.

This is cheese.

What about you?

Do you have any?

I've got loads.

I've actually got a list of them.

I've got... Wait a second.

Wait a second.

That's from The Three Amigos.

I've got three from The Three Amigos.

Oh, I've got one I always come up with.

Whenever someone says something where the answer is nothing...

I would say, do you know what nada means?

Yeah.

And then it's like, isn't that a light chicken gravy?

Do you know what the word nada means?

In all those Mexican movies you made, did you ever hear that word?

Isn't that a light chicken gravy that you just... It means nothing!

So listeners, The Three Amigos.

It's a comedy film, a really good one, a really nice one, from the 1980s.

Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Martin Short.

It's like classic 80s comedy.

Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels wrote the script and the music was done by Randy Newman.

That's it.

Yeah.

Brilliant songs.

Randy Newman's just a genius and his songs are fantastic.

I mean other stuff he did was You Got a Friend in Me.

You Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story, which is just a beautiful song.

And he also did Baltimore.

Baltimore, you know that song?

Have you heard the reggae version of that?

I have heard the reggae version and the Nina Simone version as well.

So if he, you know, whoever wrote Baltimore is a genius in my opinion.

And so Randy Newman did all the songs.

And yeah, it's like basically Steve Martin, Martin Short, Chevy Chase are movie stars in the golden age of Hollywood, the studio era, the 1920s.

And they decide that they want to negotiate more money for their movies and they go to see their producer to try to negotiate their pay and they get thrown out of the studio and fired on the spot.

And so, wait a second, is one of the things that Steve Martin says in that film.

But the NADA thing, when they ask for money, and he goes...

Do you know what the word nada means?

Yeah.

In all those Mexican movies, you ever heard that word nada?

All those Mexican movies that you made, did you ever hear that word?

And then Chevy Chase goes, isn't that a light chicken gravy with a... It means nothing.

That's exactly what you're going to get.

Yeah, because Steve Martin's like, you know, we were thinking about this next movie.

And then he starts negotiating and he ends it with like, no dough, no show.

And he's so pleased with himself.

We want money.

We want amigo money.

We want real money.

Amigo money.

No dough, no show.

And he stands there and then yeah, the producer, Mr Harry Flugelman, says do you know what the word nada means?

And all those Mexican movies that you made, did you ever hear that word?

And, yes, Chevy Chase, isn't that a light chicken gravy?

It means nothing!

Yeah.

Brilliant.

We shoot the picture in eight days.

What do you think?

That'll be the day.

What did he say?

He said that'll be the day, Mr. Flogelman.

What?

I don't think you understand who you're talking to here.

We have a few items we want to straighten out first.

Or you might be looking at three actors who really don't feel like making a Geronimo picture.

What the hell are you talking about?

Lucky, I think maybe we should... What we're talking about is money.

Real money.

Amigo money.

No dough, no show.

Boys, boys.

Do you know what the word nada means?

In all those Mexican movies you made, did you ever hear that word?

Isn't that a light chicken gravy that you just... It means nothing.

Zero.

Zip.

It's what you're gonna have when I'm through with you.

You hit Harry Flugelman on a bad day.

I'd like to continue to work for free, Mr. Flugelman.

Are you living in the studio mansion?

Yeah.

Well, not anymore, you're not.

Sam!

The Amigos are out of the mansion.

Where did you get those clothes?

From a movie?

Yeah, the studio gave them to us.

Those darn Amigos.

Well, we're taking them back.

Sam!

Get wardrobe over here right away.

Take the Amigos' clothes.

Wait a minute.

You can't take our clothes.

You gave us these clothes.

They were presents.

Come on, wait a minute.

Lucky... Wait a second.

I think you misread who you're talking to here.

Misread?

I want these schmucks off of my lot.

And Mr. Flugelman says you're not to come back on this lot ever.

I've got, are you going to pull them pistols or are you going to whistle Dixie?

Are you going to pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?

When does that pop into your head?

Just whenever I need to do something.

Often if I need to pee.

I don't know if you ever have that.

You're standing there.

You need to pee and it's not happening.

And then you're going to urinate or you're going to whistle Dixie.

Okay.

You're going to piss into the toilet or you're going to whistle Dixie.

Clint Eastwood.

I've also got, this is a conversation.

Yes.

This is a conversation.

Yes.

This is a conversation.

Yes.

And Borat, it was a great success.

That's good.

Whenever I pick out a T-shirt from my cupboard which I am not going to wear out, but I will sleep in it I always hear Nigel Tufnell going yeah, I sleep in this sometimes.

Hello listeners, hope you're doing all right.

You're now going to hear a little clip from This Is Spinal Tap, the moment when Nigel Tufnell talks about his t-shirt and he says here I sleep in this sometimes, which only happens in a split second.

That line.

But I'll play you the clip anyway.

So in this one, yeah, he's talking about his T-shirt.

And Nigel is a rock star in the 70s.

And so the T-shirt he's wearing, it's a black sleeveless T-shirt with a picture of like a skeleton, you know like a rib cage, as if we're looking at an X-ray of his chest.

And the T-shirt shows what we would see if we were looking at an X-ray.

So it's a black T-shirt with his rib cage.

But for some reason, the rib cage is green.

I suppose it's because, you know, X-rays are often like green or blue or something, aren't they?

So he's wearing this T-shirt.

With a green rib cage and the interviewer says, that's a very interesting T-shirt.

And Nigel starts describing it and starts talking about.

You know, this is an exact replica of my inner structure.

This is exactly, if you were to open me up, this is exactly what it would look like.

And the interviewer says, well, but it wouldn't be green though, would it?

And Nigel's like, ah, well, actually it is green, isn't it?

Nigel believes that actually a human rib cage is actually green on the inside.

But obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's a slightly idiotic rock star.

But anyway, I sleep in this sometimes.

There you go.

You like this?

It's very nice.

This is my exact inner structure down in a T-shirt.

Exactly medically accurate.

See?

So, in other words, if we were to take all your flesh and blood and every... Take them off.

You'd see exactly... This is what you'd see.

It wouldn't be green, though.

It is green.

You know, see how your blood looks blue?

Yeah.

Well, that's just the vein.

I mean, the colour of the vein.

I mean, the blood is actually red.

Oh, well, maybe it's not green.

I don't know.

Anyway, this is what we sleep in sometimes.

Good old night.

And then, of course, there's... Where's your base?

I don't know.

I think I left it at the airport.

That's just from an anecdote.

That's not even from a film.

That's from an interview with Chris Guest.

But it's still stuck in my mind.

I don't know.

I think I left it at the airport.

I'm just wondering, in all the amazing roles you have personally played in your films, if there's one that is especially autobiographical.

No, the answer is no.

People during Spinal Tap would come up after the movie and many bands would come up to us and say oh, I know who that is.

Yeah, yeah.

I know who that is.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's Bafta.

I said, what?

That's Bafta.

Yeah, the guy in that band in... No, it's not Bafta.

I don't even know who that is.

It's Bafta. the guy in that group.

I don't know who BAFTA is.

There's no BAFTA.

People believe what they want to see in certain things, and there's nothing autobiographical.

They're just things.

Well, Spinal Tap.

The example is that I was in a hotel in Los Angeles waiting for a friend in the lobby and an English band was checking in.

This was 1974.

The manager and I think there were four of them they went up to the desk and he started doing the thing and I was just waiting for my friend.

And the manager says to one of them where's your bass?

What?

Where's your bass?

I don't know, I think I left it at the airport.

You what?

I don't know.

You left your base at the airport.

I don't know.

Where is it?

Well, I don't know.

I'm asking you.

Well, it went on for 15 minutes.

I don't think I've ever been happier.

Except for the night that I met my wife.

Where's your base?

I don't know.

I think I left it at the airport.

He's one of the few Americans to do a really good English accent, isn't he?

He's technically English, isn't he?

Is it?

Is it, though?

Is it, blood?

Yeah, he is technically English, although he lived in America for most of his life.

Right, well, that explains it.

So he's not actually an American.

Have you ever heard Paul McCartney talking about John Lennon and him saying people say that John was like the tough one?

You know, like mean.

And that wasn't John at all.

John was a baby.

He was just a little baby.

You do a very good Paul, I have to say.

I just love hearing him say, it was just a little baby.

It's so funny to me that Paul maybe in his mind, he's like yeah, John was just a baby.

You know, he was just a little baby.

That's so cute.

Also, from The Rutles, so I've got a lot of these.

From The Rutles, that movie, that sort of comedy movie, which... What about their trousers?

Well, there's that.

Well, they were tight.

The hair and the presents...

The music.

He liked it?

No, he hated it.

Well, what did he like?

Well, the trousers.

What about the trousers?

Well, they were very tight.

Tight?

Yes, you could see quite clearly.

Oh, I see.

Everything.

Outlines.

Clear as day.

Yes, yes, thank you.

Yes.

So, tight trousers and noise.

Nothing left to the imagination.

Yes, thank you.

I've got the trousers thing, but also I've just got this one which is like how does it feel to be such an asshole?

Which is Eric Idle, the interviewer, interviewing the guy who turned down the Rutles, the guy who had the opportunity, but he said no.

And he's interviewing this guy, Brian Thigh, the guy who turned down the Rutles.

And Brian Thigh is like drinking and smoking.

He's clearly devastated by the fact that he didn't sign the Rutles and he missed out on all that money and stuff.

And so he's being interviewed by Eric Idle.

He's sort of saying, what is he saying to him?

So is it true that you had the opportunity to sign the Rutles and you turned them down?

Is that right?

And he's like, yeah.

And it's, what's his name?

Dan Aykroyd.

Dan Aykroyd, yeah.

All those millions gone.

All those album sales, all those merchandise sales, all those touring money, you didn't get them.

You just turned it down.

Yeah.

Yeah, I did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. how does it feel to be such an asshole?

But he's like the interviewer, Eric Idle, most of the time he does it in an English accent.

I'm here outside Abbey Road Studios, you know Shabby Road Studios, where the Rutles recorded their first album in 20 minutes.

Their second album took even longer.

Yeah, and he's got this English accent.

But then, just in that single line, he says how does it feel to be such an asshole?

He suddenly becomes American.

Or you could like a little American hint in his English accent that just cracks me up.

Brian Thigh was a top record executive in London in 1962.

Mr. Thigh, you've been known for many, many years as the man who turned down the Rutles.

Yeah, that's right.

You said that guitar groups were on their way out and would never make any money at all in the 60s.

Yes, I did.

You turned your back on all those millions of sales, all those hundreds of gold records.

Yeah, that's right.

What's it like to be such an asshole?

What?

All right.

Well, that'll probably do for like just stupid quotes that stick in my head.

Just a little insight into our brains there.

I don't know if there's anything left on the tombola.

Well, we had one.

We haven't had one.

Okay, one is... This is going to be... This has got to be the last thing we talk about.

But it's a big one.

Number one is this.

Aliens.

Do they walk among us?

No.

Next.

There's all this stuff in the news at the moment about the American committee looking into ufos and stuff.

And there's that guy going yep, we've got alien technology, we've got i've seen ufos, quite how many uh, thinking of stuff.

He said quite a few.

It's like the guy is clearly talking complete and utter bollocks.

So he's in a committee hearing, which is a formal legal meeting, and he's being asked by maybe a judge or something how many aliens have you seen?

Or how many UFOs do you have in your possession?

Quite a few.

Oh, you can't be more specific than that in speaking under oath.

And he's got some low-level clearance, apparently, security.

I mean, it's just fucking bollocks.

I mean, the distance... Oh, I don't know where to begin.

It's clearly.

I mean I don't want to get all tinfoil hat, but it seems like a bit of a psy-op to me.

Psychological operation to.

Basically, I think the way I see it is, the more people conspiracy theorists are talking about UFOs, the less they're talking about things like Epstein.

Things that are a little bit more prescient and real.

Yeah.

And the more airtime taken up with talking about UFOs, it's just chipping away at the real stuff.

The less we actually look at real injustices that are happening in plain view – for example, all our liberties being taken away from us and the elites essentially taking all our money and property – and freedoms from us, while we're going around debating about whether there are aliens.

Yeah, that's the way I see it.

It's just a big distraction technique.

And also maybe there's an element of like although I don't think anyone would be taken in by this like we've got alien tech.

I think you should spend more money on your defence budget than we do.

Like, hey, other countries.

Yeah, we might have alien guns, just saying yeah, we might have alien tech, we might have anti-gravity technology, but we're not, we're not saying, we're kind of saying we might have, but we're not really saying it.

But we might, we might, we do no, we do, we definitely do, might want to consider that.

Guys, if you want to launch a, you know, send any more spy balloons in our direction, you know we've got alien guns.

Sorry, we might have alien guns.

We've got alien tech and we've got alien bodies.

Uh, we just need.

We're just waiting for the dna labs to result, results to come through and uh yeah, we're all, we're all fine with that.

Yeah, and the government as well, almost to dignify it, they're not saying it's real.

They're just asking the questions.

Do we have alien guns?

Well, they do that in gossip columns.

Was Madonna seen with so-and-so last week?

Because if you pose it as a question, you can't get sued.

Right.

Was, you know, was so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so?

Well, no.

We're just asking the question.

Was James Thompson seen in Princess Diana's bedroom?

No.

But we print the question big enough.

In 1987, when he was 12 years old.

I don't know what that story is.

But you print the question big enough that, you know, people think it's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Okay.

So aliens, no, no fucking way.

And the distances are too big.

And if they do, they're not going to come down in little tin pot UFOs that are like little metal boxes, that are like flashing lights on the side.

You know, if they get all this way and then, oh, we've crash landed in the desert.

Oh, no.

It's like if they've got that level of technology to get like light years distance, they're not going to crash land in a fucking desert in like the equivalent of a Ford Focus.

Yeah, they can travel across the fucking universe avoiding asteroids.

They can't land safely.

They can get through the Earth's burning atmosphere, but they can't land on like a really flat, empty desert.

I mean, I think we talked about this before, but it's all just cover up for like, weapons development.

You know, the stealth bomber?

Yeah.

Have we talked about this before?

I think we did.

We talked about UFOs before.

The silhouette of a stealth bomber is suspiciously close to that of a UFO, classic UFO shape.

So I think the idea of a flying disc was put around.

Just if anyone saw that shape in the sky, oh, it's a flying disc.

No, it's not.

It's a flying wing.

It's a stealth bomber.

Oh, no, it's the shape of a UFO.

It's got a bubble in the middle and two long bits at the side.

It must be a flying... I mean, fuck off.

What about all those videos that got discussed on the Joe Rogan experience, though, James?

I've never seen a convincing UFO video in my life.

Well, there's the ones that are taken by pilots.

Oh, them.

They show these like kind of little glowing balls that sort of go into the ocean and they don't really understand how they can accelerate in that kind of way.

And, you know, we're told that this is all like legitimate like video footage.

How are we supposed to know?

Yeah, I don't know.

And also, could it be an anomaly in the display or something stuck to the windscreen?

People chase reflections before.

You see a reflection in your canopy, whatever it's called.

Oh my God, and it just flipped off in the other direction, because it's a reflection of a light coming from behind you, Div.

It was literally the reflection of the moon on the top of your window of your plane.

I don't know about that.

I don't know if it's that simple, but...

No, I don't know.

I'm being a bit glib about that one.

But I personally don't believe UFOs have come to Earth from other planets.

It's all terrestrial.

It's all from this.

I mean, the one I did see was a shot of like a ski resort or something.

And this silver ball flew overhead.

It's like a satellite or a spy satellite.

Nothing there that I've ever seen makes me think it's from outer space.

Why the hell would it be from outer space?

The chances are it's from around here, right?

I mean, the odds are.

But it's not from a million zillion squillion miles away.

Space.

You know, It's just interesting that people see something they don't understand and they just conclude that it's from outer space, that it's aliens.

I don't know.

Therefore, it's aliens.

I mean, it used to be the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and goblins, you know, and that's evolved into, you know.

No one talks about goblins anymore, do they?

No one says little green.

No one talks about the pixies or the fairies anymore.

They're out of fashion.

Fairies are the bomsom of your garden.

They're out of fashion.

It's aliens now.

Do you remember Ball Lightning?

That's real.

That is real.

This is real.

That's another quote in my head from Three Amigos.

This is real.

It's all real.

They are going to kill us.

You know who ripped off the Three Amigos?

Have you seen... Oh, flip.

Galaxy Quest.

No, what's that Vietnam film where they think they're making a film?

Tropic Thunder, yeah.

Tropic Thunder totally ripped off the Three Amigos but with none of the charm or humour.

No, Tropic Thunder's pretty good, I think.

Yeah, it's all right.

It is a rip-off of The Three Amigos.

But also Galaxy Quest is another one that's pretty much the same story.

I can't stand those films.

I tried watching the first one.

I hated it.

What?

Which one?

No, you're thinking Guardians of the Galaxy.

Galaxy Quest is like Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and it's like a joke on Star Trek.

They're basically the cast of Star Trek, but they hate each other and then they get into a situation where they're encountering real aliens.

Yeah.

Right.

And, you know, with hilarious consequences, three amigos, they're movie stars.

There's people in like a village in Mexico that needs their help thinking that they're real.

They go, then they're not real and they can't save the village, but then they do save the village.

And it's kind of awesome.

Okay.

Here I am again, interrupting the episode.

Hello, all three of you who are still alive after having listened to all of this so far.

I say three.

I'm joking, of course.

It's more like three million because, you know, everyone listens to this podcast, don't they?

Three billion.

Three billion people still listening.

It started out as six billion.

It's just gone down to three million.

It's all right.

I can live with that.

That's okay.

Anyway.

So I'm interrupting here because I'm trying to help you navigate through this conversation, of course, right.

So we talk again about the film Three Amigos.

And James is going to start referring to another film which is called Green Street, a film about English football hooligans.

He describes it as being laughably bad, like it's so bad, it's sort of good in a way.

And in the film, the actor Elijah Wood, the one who plays Frodo Baggins.

He's an American who goes to London and he ends up becoming a football hooligan or mixing with some dangerous football hooligan type guys.

And there's a scene where he gets attacked by a dangerous looking football hooligan.

And Elijah Wood, Frodo Baggins, manages to fight back.

He somehow finds some inner strength.

And he convincingly fights back against this crazy Birmingham City football hooligan.

And his friend is impressed and said, how did you do that?

And Elijah Wood's character describes how he had to imagine that the football hooligan who he was facing was in fact someone that he hated, or someone that he wanted to get revenge on, or his old nemesis from school, like the school bully who used to pick on him at school.

He just had to get all that rage and anger against that person from his past and project it onto the football hooligan who's approaching him with a knife in his hand.

And that's what allowed him to build up the anger that he needed to fight back.

And James's point is that that's ridiculous, because when you've got a football hooligan approaching you with a very sharp knife in his hand who says he's going to kill you, you don't need to go back into your past and remember a school bully, because this football hooligan is like 10 times worse than that guy in school who used to smack you on the back of the head with a newspaper and take your lunch money.

This football hooligan is actually going to murder you with a knife.

So there's no need to actually... go back into your past and remember and summon up your courage.

There's an actual much greater threat in front of you.

So just use real anger or real fear or whatever it is you're feeling at this moment to strike back against this guy.

And, oh dear, right.

So there's that.

You're going to hear James talking about that.

I hope you don't mind me explaining this.

Do you mind?

No, you don't.

Okay, great.

And we also refer again to the film Three Amigos, which you heard us talking about before.

And in that film, at the end of the film, Steve Martin's character makes a powerful speech, a moving speech to the people of this small Mexican village, right.

And he's trying to motivate these simple people to find the courage within themselves that they need in order to fight back against the bad guy who's going to come to the village to steal all their things and maybe kill them right.

Okay.

So in his speech he makes this rousing speech where he says to everyone sometimes you just have to find your inner courage.

Everyone has to find their inner El Guapo.

Okay.

Everyone has an El Guapo.

So the bandit who's going to come and kill them and rob them is called El Guapo.

He's the leader of this group of bandits who are terrorizing this village.

And so Steve Martin's character makes this moving, motivating speech, basically saying everyone has their own personal El Guapo.

For some people, shyness is their El Guapo.

You know, he's basically talking about the fact that everyone has a weakness and everyone has to find their way to overcome their weakness.

And then he says for us, our El Guapo just happens to be the actual El Guapo, a dangerous man who wants to kill us.

So the reason that we're talking about Three Amigos and this hooligan film is that the scene from that hooligan film where Elijah Wood has to find his own personal El Guapo.

It reminded James of the film Three Amigos, where Steve Martin makes a speech to encourage everyone to find their own personal El Guapo, even though for them, their personal El Guapo happens to be the actual El Guapo.

Oh my God, do you understand?

Okay.

I don't know what you're thinking at this point if all this explaining is necessary.

But you know, I'll just remind you of the.

Don't blame me, blame the guy from yesterday, that lovely Lepster, who told me yeah, we love it when you explain stuff.

It really helps us to navigate through your episodes.

So just pick, you know, if you want to have an argument with someone, take it up with him.

Go to his YouTube and comment on his stuff.

I don't think he has a YouTube.

I don't know.

But anyway, you get the point.

All right, then let's carry on with the conversation then.

Here we go.

El Guapo is on his way.

Someday the people of this village will have to face El Guapo.

We might as well do it now.

In a way, all of us have an El Guapo to face someday.

For some, shyness might be their El Guapo.

For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo.

For us, El Guapo is a big dangerous guy who wants to kill us.

But as sure as my name is Lucky Dave, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo.

Oh, something that reminded me of that was... Have you ever seen Green Street?

Green Street?

No.

The reason I mention that is because I live not far from Green Street now in East London.

What is it?

It's known as Green Street Hooligans in other countries.

It's a hilarious unintentionally hilarious hooligan film about West Ham fans, because I'm just down the road from West Ham now and Elijah Wood's in it.

Oh, yeah.

And in his first... He basically gets... He's an American on holiday.

He's been kicked out of college.

He...

He ends up hanging out with his girlfriend's or his sister's mate or something, his girlfriend's brother or something, who's a football hooligan in the West Ham firm, as they call it.

And his first interaction with hooligans is he comes across a bunch of Zulus which are Birmingham City fans and they're going to kill him.

Why?

Because they're football hooligans, they're rival fans.

And he's like, have you met my mate Stanley?

And he gets a Stanley knife out and he's like, oh my God.

And then he goes into apeshit mode and somehow beats like two Zulus up and gets away.

What Elijah Wood does, Frodo Baggins.

Frodo Baggins does.

And then they have this, it's all sort of, it's a ridiculous film.

It's really funny though.

And the head hooligan, his mate, was like When you're up against it like that, you have to put all your hatred and passion into that punch and really think.

It's basically the scene from The Three Amigos where he goes, who's your El Guapo?

For us, it happens to be the real El Guapo.

And for Elijah Wood, it's this guy at college that cheated him out of his exam results, or something like that.

And he's like...

He has the whole conversation about who's your El Guapo.

And I was thinking, in that case, if you're confronted with some Birmingham football fans with a standing knife, you're not thinking now, who's my personal?

El Guapo.

You're thinking, fuck, this guy is the ultimate adversary.

There's no need to look deep inside yourself to find that hatred and passion from a previous encounter.

You're going to get your head kicked in.

Yeah.

There's no need to search for your personal El Guapo.

This guy is far more prescient and dangerous than anyone in your history.

You know what I'm trying to say?

I do know what you're trying to say.

You're being faced with a massive, drunk Birmingham City football fan.

He's armed with a very sharp knife and he absolutely hates you because you're a West Ham fan and he is going to kill you.

You don't need to look inside yourself and find your own personal guapo.

You mean your own personal sort of nemesis or your biggest fear.

Like when I was a child, my biggest fear was being in my room in the dark.

The dark was my biggest fear.

So when I'm faced with a murderous football hooligan, I don't need to go back to my fear of the dark.

Like the football hooligan with the knife, is much more frightening than my old, ancient fear of the dark.

Yeah, yeah.

So who were you punching when you punched that Birmingham City fan?

He goes, you know, Alexander Scott, that guy from college that I always hated.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no.

He's not the problem here.

The football fan is far, far more of a threat.

You don't need to look inside yourself and find your own personal demons.

It's really, really ridiculous.

The whole film is hilarious.

In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face.

For some, shyness might be their El Guapo.

For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo.

For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us.

But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo.

El Graffo is the baddie in The Three Amigos.

And El Graffo means the beautiful one, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, right.

Well, good.

I'm glad that we really sorted out all of those things and fixed so many problems in this conversation.

Yeah, well, you know, we do a bit.

We're just doing our best, listeners.

But that's it from the Glib Brothers for this episode, everybody.

Yes.

I've got to go now in order to just do something else.

That was very Alan Partridge.

No, it's been emotional.

It's been amusing.

It's been slightly frightening in some parts.

It's been a pleasure.

I hope everyone could keep up.

They probably couldn't, but thanks for hanging out with us.

Well, remember the skate ramp of audience retention?

Yeah, we're at the flat bottom now.

We're cruising out into the long flat bottom.

It's actually a quarter pipe rather than a half pipe, isn't it?

We're just off down the street now.

Yeah, it's unlikely that audience retention goes all the way back up as you get to the end of the episode.

No, it doesn't go back up.

It's a quarter pipe, not a half pipe.

Because that would be weird if some people the same number of people who clicked on the video also come back to the video and fast forward to the last few seconds.

I can think of one type of video which is like the half pipe.

I don't know if I should mention it.

Let's move on.

Is it a sexy video?

No.

Let's move on.

Let's move on from that.

OK, well, anyway, thank you, listeners, for being here with us on the flat plane here of audience retention at the end of the episode.

Well done.

You're one of the hardcore.

You are the special ones and you are the ones that AI will be rescuing in the future, or at least sparing.

Those ones with no attention span, they are no good to the human race and they will be jettisoned.

Maybe you should say a word at the end that people can write in the comments.

If they listen to the end and no one else in the comments will understand what that means.

I do that sometimes.

You can tell us what your own personal, who's your own personal El Guapo?

What's your personal El Guapo?

El Guapo, E-L, Spanish speakers obviously will know, but E-L-G-U-A-P-P-O, El Guapo.

What's your own personal El Guapo?

What's your El Guapo, Luke, your personal El Guapo?

My personal El Guapo?

That is an unexpected question.

I'd need to delve deep into my soul in order to find the actual answer.

Well, I'll tell you mine you can think about.

I think laziness is my El Guapo.

Yeah.

I'm very lazy.

That's it.

This is a confession, basically.

I'm a very lazy person.

Well, I'm glad I managed to actually get you to achieve something today.

I mean, you've got an album.

I'm good at doing things I want to do.

I'm just terrible at doing things I don't want to do.

So laziness is your El Guapo.

Procrastination is your El Guapo.

My El Guapo might be rambling, but I've turned my El Guapo into my strength.

So I'm like Batman in Batman Begins.

Yeah, you've turned your advert... My weakness into a sort of strength that I use in my own favour.

So Batman's fear of bats in his childhood becomes He uses that, he embodies that fear in order to fight crime.

And I've done the same.

Yeah, a bit far-fetched.

Most people would just get some counselling, possibly just carry it with them for a long time.

Not really want to go in dark places.

Not many people would suddenly buy a flash car.

Yeah, who does his car?

Well, it's Morgan Freeman, isn't it?

The kind of weapons guy.

No, but he's not in the original story.

Oh, the original story, yeah, I don't know.

Isn't it Alfred, basically?

Alfred does everything.

He's a butler, but he's also like... Mechanic, engineer.

Yeah, an inventor, mechanic, engineer, genius.

He's got a lot of blackmail material against Batman.

I mean, it's a good thing he doesn't turn against him.

Alfred.

Yeah.

Yeah, but would you, though?

Would you turn against... That's an interesting plot idea for Batman.

But he's a butler.

I mean, the working class, you know, may rise against their... Michael Caine.

Now, listen, Batman.

I'm working class.

If you... What would it be?

I think my wages are due.

If you take any more liberties with the law again, I'm going to break off and start my own rival superhero franchise called The Butler.

Let's just say I've been looking at my wage packet and it has not been rising in line with inflation.

And a bit, you know what I mean.

Shuck in a sweetener for me and I won't say anything.

Right, okay.

Great, there you go.

DC Comics, go ahead and make that.

The butler, a new... The butler that turned.

Yeah, exactly.

When Alfred decides to become a superhero himself and he takes all the technology and becomes the butler starring a de-aged Michael Cade.

One quick one, a letter in Vista was in recently.

I had an idea for a concept.

Giza Butler and his Giza Butler.

So rock star bass player Giza Butler from Black Sabbath and his Giza Butler, who's played by Danny Dyer.

No one understands that.

There you go, folks.

So who's your personal El Guapo?

We'll leave it at that.

OK, thank you so much for listening all the way through to the end.

And this has been a conversation.

Yes.

Okay, listeners, so we're nearly at the end.

I'd like you to just reflect now on what your personal el guapo is.

What is your personal el guapo?

Maybe, I don't know, phrasal verbs are your personal el guapo.

Or it could be, I don't know, pronunciation of ed endings is your personal el guapo.

Or maybe it's the pronunciation of minimal pairs in vowel sounds.

In English pronunciation, that may be your el guapo.

I don't know.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this episode.

But it sounds like the end.

It's not the end now because, of course, I have to ramble on a bit more, don't I?

I do.

I don't know what you think about this episode.

You can let me know in the comments section.

You should refer to El Guapo.

Okay, that's G-U-A-P-P-O, El Guapo.

Anyway, let us know about your own personal El Guapo in the comments section, in order to show that you got to this stage in the episode.

Maybe some of you, maybe you'll check the episode page for this later and you'll see that there are just no comments about El Guapo.

You'll just realize that everyone's just, they're all just skeletons now.

I don't know.

But let me now ramble on a little bit more at the end of the episode, because why not?

I mean, we've got this far.

Why not push it a little bit further?

OK.

All right.

So stick around for a bit more rambling and and and, then I'll let you continue with the rest of your life.

That was the long rambling conversation with James.

The Glib Brothers reunited on the podcast again.

If you're still here, well done.

You survived the drop-off, the audience drop-off.

All the other people have dropped off.

Maybe they dropped off to sleep.

I don't know.

But you're still here.

Well done.

Congratulations.

I respect your commitment to Luke's English podcast.

So, yeah, a lot of things, a lot of stuff in that episode.

The film Blow Up references to the Bee Gees, the Gibb brothers, barry morris and robin gibb, the bgs, the gibb brothers, but obviously this was the glib brothers, wasn't it?

This time, with james and me talking about bands, every band has a secret weapon.

I'd love to continue that conversation.

Listening back to this, I thought we didn't talk about as many bands as I wanted to.

You know, you could continue that.

Every band has a secret weapon a member of the group that perhaps isn't the most obvious one, but is still providing a really important message.

Elements of the band like, for example, the Beatles.

Of course, it's George Harrison, isn't it?

It's got to be George.

Obviously, Ringo is an essential foundation, but George is definitely the secret weapon.

He provided amazing harmonies, that third voice which blended so well with Paul and John's voices.

The songwriting George's songs like Here Comes the Sun and Something are in the top five most listened to Beatles songs on Spotify.

In fact, the song on Spotify, the Beatles song on Spotify that is in number one place with the most number of listens, is Here Comes the Sun, the George Harrison one.

So we can't underestimate the contribution he made in terms of songs, but also just like the musical side as well.

I've mentioned the vocal harmonies, but also things like little things he did on the guitar, just little hooks and riffs and contributions he made.

But of course, John and Paul were there getting all the attention and getting all the glory.

But I think George was the secret weapon.

And another band, The Police...

I think that Andy Summers has to be the secret weapon in the police because obviously Sting is the obvious front man really, and the one that we see at the front.

He's the one who wrote the songs and he's got that incredible voice and the bass playing as well.

So Sting is obvious.

Right.

And then Stuart Copeland is also pretty obvious, because you know music, fans will surely know Stuart Copeland as one of the most famous drummers in the world, one of the best drummers in the world and an attention grabbing drummer.

And he kind of, to an extent, defined the police's sound with those different rhythms, the reggae stuff that he did.

And he's also quite a colourful character.

In interviews, you know, he's entertaining and vocal.

And so he kind of steals the limelight as well.

But Andy Summers on the guitar, absolutely the secret weapon because of the sort of soundscapes, the sound textures.

He was able to contribute to the group with the different guitar effects and stuff.

And also some very memorable, catchy hooks and riffs.

For example, Every Breath You Take, the one that was sampled by Puff Daddy, I think.

Every Breath You Take.

That guitar riff, which is so famous, so iconic, that was written by Andy Summers.

And, you know, those are the sorts of things he would contribute to the police.

I mean, the police is a three-piece.

They're all essential elements.

But I think that probably in the police, Andy Summers has to be considered the secret weapon.

So anyway, we could go on about that further, but I can't.

I mustn't.

Every band has a secret weapon.

Then we talked about Diary of a CEO, which is this famous podcast.

The book that James mentioned about New Order and Joy Division was called Record Play Pause by Stephen Morris.

Then, of course, we talked about chat GPT and AI, as you well know.

James referenced the book 1984 by George Orwell, that famous story of a totalitarian government, but also Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, another book which has a similar vision of a kind of future society, a kind of authoritarian or totalitarian regime or situation in society, but just in a different way.

Fascinating, both completely fascinating books.

And then there was the whole section about the lines from movies and TV shows which often spring into our heads, or at least into my head.

And there was some Alan Partridge.

There was Spinal Tap.

If you don't know about Spinal Tap, go back into my episode archive and go back to the episode which is called Film Club.

This Is Spinal Tap.

It's just a fantastic film.

If you're a music fan, if you're a fan of comedy, you must listen to that episode and then find the film and watch it.

It will improve your life, okay?

It's just a joy from start to finish.

But also the film Three Amigos...

And I expect that I went into that in quite a lot of detail and explained the plot in order to help you understand the things we were talking about.

But Three Amigos is just a wonderful film.

And it's a family favourite in our house.

All of us love that film.

I mean, particularly my dad, my brother and me.

And...

Every now and then we will sit down maybe on a Saturday afternoon and watch it together.

And it's always a joy from start to finish.

It's just a very sweet, very funny and just lovely.

It's just a lovely, funny film.

And so I would recommend it as well.

Three Amigos.

Okay, I'm going to stop talking now.

Thank you for listening to this episode.

My son is still asleep in the carrier.

My shoulders are really hurting.

I just thought you'd like to know that.

You might be able to hear the noise of children playing in the playground of the school nearby, which is quite a nice sound really.

It's better than the sound of drilling and hammering.

I think the guys working on the building site are taking a break or something.

Maybe they stop working when the kids are playing outside.

I don't know.

It's lunchtime.

That's it.

It's lunchtime.

Everything stops in Paris when it's lunchtime because you've got to take a good hour and a half to two hours to sit down and enjoy a full lunch.

Of course you do.

Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling.

Thank you so much for listening.

Okay, I will speak to you again on the podcast soon when I get the chance to record new episodes and to work on them.

And that includes premium stuff, which is in the pipeline.

All right.

Good.

Speak to you soon.

But for now, it's time to say goodbye.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.

For more information, visit teachaluke.co.uk.

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[A Rambling Conversation with James: Music, AI, and Cultural References]-[846. Topic Tombola with James 🎧]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Glib Brothers Return

Musical Deep Dives and Hidden Talents

The AI Dilemma: Politeness and Existential Risk

Cultural Lexicon: Films and TV Quotes

Conclusion: Finding Your "El Guapo"

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[A Rambling Conversation with James: Music, AI, and Cultural References]-[846. Topic Tombola with James 🎧]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Glib Brothers Return

Musical Deep Dives and Hidden Talents

The AI Dilemma: Politeness and Existential Risk

Cultural Lexicon: Films and TV Quotes

Conclusion: Finding Your "El Guapo"

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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