The Gargle - Culture special

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Culture is the subject of this week's special episode of The Gargle.Kai Samra and Huge Davies join host Alice Fraser to get into the latest in culture news, featuring:🛳 TikTok cruise🤳 TikTok layoffs🥤 Stanley Cups📱 Instagram nudges📚 Cultural predictionsRemember to click Follow The Gargle in your podcast app to make sure you get every episode.If you enjoy the show leave a review, tell your friends, and share us on social media.To watch video versions of this and all other Bugle podcasts, head to the Bugle YouTube channel and hit subscribe.Would you like to help support The Gargle and other Bugle podcasts? I certainly would!You canMake a one-off donationJoin Team Bugle to get ad-free podcastsOr become a Super Bugler to also get exclusive podcasts and a limited edition episode of The Bugle on orange 12" vinyl. YES PLEASE!This week's stories:Story 1: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/jan/20/tiktok-nine-month-cruise-what-is-it-and-and-why-cant-i-stop-watchingStory 2: https://www.wired.com/story/the-stark-realities-of-posting-your-layoff-on-tiktok/Story 3: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/stanley-cup-hype-rcna132372Story 4: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/instagram-launches-sleep-notifications-teens-rcna134468This episode was presented and written by Alice Fraser, Kai Samra and Huge DaviesAnd produced by Ped Hunter, with executive production from Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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

Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows

great enthusiasms, the great devotions? Who spends himself in a worthy cause? Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement? And who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while listening to the gargle? Welcome to The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. All of the news, none of the politics. And this week's edition, a special culture edition of the podcast slash magazine. Your guest editors are Kai Samra and Hugh Davies.

Welcome. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Sorry, that was weird. That sounded like an echo. Just hello. Cultural because we're both ethnic. I know, it's about saying we're full of culture, me and you.

We're the go-to culture people in the comedy circuit. We'll be translating this. I mean, if you want to see behind the curtain, it was originally going to be a beauty episode, but I figured that both of you were too much experts in the field and you would have to take it so seriously that I changed it to culture. Genuinely.

I knew that was the last minute. When I say genuinely, the reasoning was not quite that clear. I thought, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to talk necessarily to the huge rush on drunk elephant skin care by 10-year-olds in Sephoras across America. I'm testing animals and children every single day. on drunk elephant skin care by 10-year-olds in Sephoras across America. I'm testing animals and children every single day. How dare you assume that I wouldn't be?

Before we plunge our arms into the hot stew that is this week's top stories on culture, let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover of this magazine is the newest collab craze, sweeping TikTok. A Stanley Cup meets Crocs meets skincare for tweens. It's basically a rubber cup with holes in it packed with niacinamide. It's $200 a pop and they've already sold out till 2027 because a teenager with a jawline of a crocodile

mimed that one was his penis over a Nicki Minaj diss track. That's how culture happens now. The headlines of the front cover read, Special Culture Edition, three chia pudding mistakes that are causing you to gain weight, and celebrity red carpet errors being born after the age of centralised media gatekeepers, so I don't know who the f*** any of you are.

The satirical cartoon this week is a baby in a crib surrounded by scientists in lab coats. The baby is wearing an adult-sized cardigan and slacks and glasses and the scientist with the clipboard is saying, on the bright side, it's a breakthrough in anti-aging skin care. The implication being that it turned an adult into a baby. Top story this week is TikTok's nine month cruise. Now for a website that encourages one minute videos, this seems counterintuitive at best. TikTok is running a nine month cruise.

Huge Davis, you have a long attention span. Can you unpack this story for us? There's a nine-month cruise, and I think it's very expensive, is it not? And they get TikTokers to go on there. They make videos about it. But they're on there for nine months. I don't know how long a normal cruise is. Is it like a few months?

Is nine months a very long time to be on a cruise? I don't know anything about cruises. As somebody who has just completed a nine-month cruise, no. I mean, first of all, it's 40 weeks. That is 10 months. Stop f***ing lying. Also, four out of five first births go more than a week overdue. So they lie twice to you.

Sorry. The TikTok cruise basically is a content mill. The idea is that they're meant to be traveling for a very long period and they're meant to be and by them i mean tiktok influencers have been lured offshore in order to travel to more than 60 countries across seven continents why you would want a nine-month cruise is inexplicable to me i thought what happened was they were all normal cruise ship people and then a few of them did tiktok videos and then they went really viral and then everyone became tiktokers because of the success of them or something i don't know if that i just misread that wrong but that just sounds like my worst nightmare i mean contagions do spread it's misread that wrong, but that just sounds like my worst nightmare. I mean, contagions do spread.

It's the buffet. That is worse than coronavirus. It's this TikTok virus, just pandemic that's been spread around. I don't know. I'm not a big fan. I've never been on a cruise. I don't see all the appeal of cruises.

Like, I don't know. I feel like if it was up to me, I would just ban cruises. Like I know a lot of brown politicians at the moment are like, stop the boats. Not on board with that. But if it was cruise boats, I would definitely be on board with stopping them it just seems like a hotel surrounded by

sharks that you just can't leave like it just sounds it's like a just a prison but at least with a prison you just have to deal with other inmates so this one you just have to deal with other tiktokers it just sounds so much worse yeah but i feel like unlike a prison everyone who's there deserves to be there i mean the more you talk about how it's like a boat surrounded by sharks the more i'm like maybe it's time to get on tick tock do you know what i mean if that was what i was watching then maybe i'd be into it you know you hear about comedians we are comedians and you and you hear about comedians that go on cruises and do entertainment, but it's like, you're there for, you're kind of doing a show for the whole boat,

but then if you bomb, you're then stuck on board with the audience. Can you imagine that? Like, I don't think any comedian could gig for nine months for the same crowd and do well. So inevitably, there's, I saw, I saw i researched this as entertainers on crew at some point like during that nine months day they're gonna have a bad night and then have to be on that boat for what is probably about what five months eating with all the audience members

i would sooner die it's expensive though isn't it it's like 60 grand or something i don't know what this thing i think that's such a litmus test because like i feel like the more money you have the more you want to like leave land like either like be on the water or underneath the water in a submarine or like in space i feel like the more money you have like you know like back in the day it was always like you could tell how how working class someone i was was by depending on how big their tv is i feel like now it's like how much you want to leave land. You know, it's just like a weird thing that like rich people love doing.

It's really weird. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like they should have, they should have had a lot of this on the Titanic or something. I think it would have made it a lot more interesting. You know, just like,

you know, just like Rose saying to Jack, like Instagram me, like one of your French girls or something like that. Or just like, I guarantee at least one person on that boat will fake them almost dying on the boat like they'll fall off the boat or something and they'll be like ah it filled me falling off the boat though yeah i mean comedians have lied a lot worse than that for an edinburgh show so for tiktok likes i

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Acast.com Now it's time for your next top stories. This is employment news, and this is the news, I don't know if it's the news, but it's certainly in the news. This is the story of the lady who went viral for posting her layoff on TikTok. And the fact that this is now part of a broader trend among usually young people to live stream their humiliation. Kai Samra, you've been fired before. Can you unpack this story for us?

Yeah, so this is the story of how workers are posting their layoff and termination meetings on TikTok, exposing a darker side to work life. Workers are very anxious and frustrated at the moment. You know, apparently 400,000 people are estimated to have lost their job over the past two years. So younger workers, particularly Gen Z, are posting through it and like sharing their day in the past four years two years so younger workers particularly gen z are posting through it and like sharing their day in the life videos are being laid off or videos like

like their videos of their company laying them off more than a year i think the thing is the thing that bothers me isn't the fact that they're putting on social media um it's the fact they're putting it on tiktok you know it's like why that it's like who's getting made redundant and thinks right i need to express this to the world through the medium of like a doja cat dance routine or something you know feel like it's put on twitter or linkedin um and also like like it's just weird because uh you are actually right actually i've actually been i was thinking about this while i was doing this i think i've been sacked from almost every job i've ever had um but it was always because i was too nervous to have the conference like the conversation saying I want to leave.

So I think, okay, well, I'll just turn up late till they kind of fire me. And I remember working at a call centre when I was a bit younger and I was just turning up late to shifts, kind of hoping they'd fire me. And they did. And I remember the manager took me in

and the meeting said to me, and I quote, that I was a disgrace to the Asian community, which I was like, I was literally the only Asian person working there, apart from like an IT guy called Ranjit or something. I was thinking if I recorded that and put it on TikTok, that would have, that at least got me a few hundred likes,

if anything, at least I could have got something out of that. So I'm massively on board with it, with these people doing it. I don't know what you guys think. It is comprehensive refutation of the spirit, if not of the technical truth of the phrase, the revolution will not be televised. The revolution may not be televised,

but it will absolutely be live streamed to some pre-chewed track that's going viral around and with a filter on it. Like this is the most depressing version of the future yeah it won't be televised but it will be tiktok'd i think if you're tick you're putting the firing you're filming the firing of yourself and putting up on tiktok i think you also deserve to be fired. I think that that's how I would fire people at my company. I'd fire everyone individually,

and then I'd see who posts about it on TikTok, and then I'd fire them. I think that if you've ever been like, anything bad's happened to you, and your first instinct is to make it into a 30-second video full of views, you're basically a subhuman and you should be fired so basically all comedians is what you're saying yeah like yeah well that's why we all technically don't have jobs because we are we have we have been as you said we've all been fired from

our jobs so this is now what's left yeah i mean to be fair i would would rather put up a video of me being fired than a video of me doing terrible crowd work from a gig over and over and over again. What do you do for a living? Okay, what a terrible job. Genuinely, I am worried that this trend of posting crowd work clips will bring back the rise of the heckler. Because when I started doing doing comedy it felt like audiences were learning to stop heckling but now if all they see of stand-up comedy is some just absolute

arsehole engaging in crowd work they're going to think that they're contributing to the show again which would be a devastating outcome yeah audiences i'm sorry just as a general i don't think they get such a shock from me when i'm like shut up and there's zero comic timing we're just like stop talking but yeah i know i don't know i feel like if ai was like harvesting data on like what comedy is now it essentially would just be like a crowd bird and also i don't know if this is a myth i'm not a massive like a techno genius but i'm like this is a myth. I'm not a massive, like, techno genius. But I'm like, this is like Chinese government, like, harvesting TikTok data and stuff.

I just think, like, if that, like, we're just giving such a terrible, like, just a terrible look of our workforce in England if we're just posting up pictures of us, videos of us just getting fired. I don't think it looks good. just posting up pictures of videos of us just getting fired. I don't think it looks good. Now it's time for your cultural predictions for 2024. As our cultural experts here on the podcast,

what do you see as the future of this year in the arts and culture sphere? Huge? I reckon reading will become cool again. Reading hasn't been cool for about four years now. I think that people are going to start reading again and it'll be cool again, like the TikToks of people reading.

Probably in complete silence, just maybe like a... And then again, three years after that, reading not cool anymore. But yeah, I've got a real good feeling about books this year. Maybe Waterstones will be like a new trend. Like everyone goes to Waterstones with their water bottles.

I've seen new water bottles on the cruise. You'll see it on the cruise TikTok. You'll start to see people reading more books. And not like Hungry Caterpillar. I'm talking about Order of the Phoenix. I'm talking Half-Blood Prince. So yeah, I think reading is going to come

back into fashion. Because I think now it's kind of cool to like reading, but it's going to become really cool. Yeah, I think about vinyls. But then I think it will only be like pricks who decide, well it will be like I'm reading but it's ironic.

Like I've just got a book. Look at me. There'll be a whole landscape of people doing, you know, people pretending to read TikToks or people pretending to read to make fun of the TikToks people reading. Ironic reading is just someone with a with a paperback novel upside down on a train yeah 100 and then but actually no one's actually ever getting any reading done so there's actually no there's actually no reading it's just tiktoks of people

reading i think it's going to be huge in a year yeah i love how your big like prediction for this big thing that's going to happen in 2024 is like books reading yeah i think it's gonna be huge yeah it's gonna be really big trust me people are gonna start reading that's what they said in 1024 and it wasn't true then um kai what are your predictions for 2024 culturally speaking so i think in 2024 uh we're gonna continue this recent cultural trend which i think happened like last year a little bit, where like when terrible things happen, which obviously happened a lot recently, a lot of people I hang around with basically don't try and like tackle the problem, like in my generation, they basically kind of change the wording in order to make it sound a little bit cuter.

You know, like this has happened loads. Like, you know, like back in the day, it was called like an economic crash. Then it was like a recession. Then it was a cost of living crisis. And then suddenly people that used to hang around were like called a cost of living crisis, a cosy lives. And I was like, you can't just call an awful thing a cosy lives that sounds like a woolly jumper or something.

It was the same with the outbreak. Like first it was like a virus. Then it was like a COVID-19. And then people in Birmingham genuinely used to refer to it as a spicy cough I was just like that's not a thing stop that's like what you get from like a fiery binda loo or something so I'm a bit worried um about what's going to happen in 2024 obviously there's loads of elections happening I think like I think like Trump's going to get in power

sort of like change the legislation he's going to like change this new world order it'll all be like under this dictatorship of donald trump and like everyone will start calling it like a dicky trump or something like that um so i'm just like fingers crossed we're not gonna revert to that i think that's what i think i think my least favorite one of that is someone uh calling a mental health crisis a menti bee a mental i want to stick with the old school language there I want to call it shell shock or as we used to call it he's gone to the country for a short holiday my third bee-dizzle of the year

a major bee-dizzle with my with my therapizzle and this is the news that the Stanley Cup has been dominating culture so wildly over the last year that people are now speculating that it has reached capacity, that there is no more room in the culture for Stanley to dominate

and there will be a new water bottle or, potentially, some other thing people will care about that will rise to take its place. Kai Samra, you're well hydrated. Can you unpack this story for us? Okay, so this is a story of how video surfers of countless young people running around targets, obviously the US department store, for a limited edition of the Stanley Cup water bottle,

which has become a must-have for many social media users. It's called the stanley quencher and it checks in at a foot tall capable of holding 40 ounces of liquid it's been described as an emotional support water bottle by some and a must-have for the others uh basically although it's first caught on a trendy object during the pandemic this cup has proved to be a surprisingly resilient cultural object like Ugg boots apparently, among the long-lasting hallmarks of Gen Z millennial girl culture. I don't know why it's for girls, but yeah, I was still like I was saying earlier, I'll be honest, I could massively do with

an emotional support water bottle. I feel like as I'm getting older, I just need more and more emotional support. Like now I feel like the vibe and happiness I get from like a weighted blanket is like the same as I used to get from like ketamine or something. I don't know. It just seems to be replaced as I'm getting older. Like the same vibes I get is just from comfort. And as I was saying earlier, like I just feel like I'm a big I have a massive like a beverage goblin like I've just got so many beverages on the go at any one time I feel like the appeal of the Stanley Cup is not just that it is the cup but it's that that you can then accessorize they've got you know little plates that you can add or little little snack bowls that you can attach or you can hang them off your shoulder because obviously they're too big to fit into a

bag or you can have little caps that you put on the straws, so they become a site of self-expression in the way that so many things that are sort of consumer goods have now become a way to express yourself by buying the exact right way to, you know, like... You can express yourself with anything with accessories if you've got enough stickers, you know. I mean... Just get stickers and put stickers on it that's fine i don't understand it i think some of these things are just unexplainable there's a video clip that i saw of them talking about this with experts and it's like a it's like a financial expert and they're talking to this expert and they're like so can you explain this is like well people are just like uh buying a water bottle and then they are just posting it online and that's that's it i'm like

just say people are idiots yeah just say it just say we don't know we've lost control of the way people think anymore people are just buying 300 water bottles for no reason whatsoever this will be this is a fad this has happened has happened before. And yeah, I'm sorry about this. I'm sorry we have to report. I'm sorry that before I used to report on the crisis and now I'm having to explain why water bottles of a certain different colours are becoming more popular. But I feel like this is unfolding

a more sort of dangerous underlying trend here, which is that traditionally, fashions have risen up from the youth, often from teenage girls, and then spread into communities of colour and outwards into, for example, other subcultures, the LGBTQ plus community, and then it blossoms from there into coolness in the mainstream culture. That's one of the ways that it can go, obviously. But this, the Stanley Cup craze, much like the Crocs craze,

has come down from middle-aged women into youth culture. And this, to me, feels like an upending of the natural order. This is frogs raining from the sky shit. This is deeply unnatural that people in their tweens should be watching middle-aged ladies uh on water talk and taking their cues there from uh i think it's a really worrying thing yeah i actually read in that article it was like apparently it was for construction workers it was like supposed to be this really indestructible water bottle for construction workers i just i just weird just think that's really weird.

It's like items for working class construction workers are now being adopted by middle class Gen Z kids. I don't know how far it's going to go. It's like, how much do you want to gentrify? It's like Brixen, Dreadlock. So now it's water bottles. It's kind of insane. And I feel like if this trend keeps on going,

I just feel like in the future, you're just going to get kids wearing supreme construction work hard hats or something. I don't know. It just seems like a weird thing to adopt. But yeah, it is kind of worrying. It's a weird thing because they don't know. You know how like North Face has become really popular? Like it's become like a thing.

Whereas like, have you been to a North Face shop recently? It's hilarious because inside, because it's just a mountain. They just it's just for people who like climbing mountains and dog walkers basically. But now since they've had this thing, they don't know how to advertise the brand. So it's like you go in and it's like youths climbing mountains looking kind of cool, but they don't be able to lose their main because they know it's a fad they know this North Face thing will go in about

five years they don't want to like lose all the old customers of people who are like walking up Snowdon or whatever so they're trying

to combine the two with the water bottle as well they're like also just trying to because they know it's going to go the last thing you

want is cool fans actually I stand by this principle you want you definitely don't want cool fans because they're looking for the this principle you want you want you definitely don't want cool fans because they're looking for the next cool thing and you're never going to be the next cool thing also the thing the north faces i really don't accept when companies are trying to

appeal to like two different sets of cultures and seeing as like we're now so polarized it's like they're like yeah north face it's like the mountain is a metaphor for civil rights and then to these people they're like no it's actually a mountain can you you can use it to climb a mountain but also a metaphor and you're just like what are you appealing to here but yeah it is weird like i said i was like it's just a weird thing that like back in my day it was like fads were like tamagotchi and pokemon cards and now it's water bottles i feel like so i'm just really glad i wasn't born this generation. Like if not, not just the AI, but it just seems a lot less cool or exciting. Like a water bottle.

You don't even get anything in it. It's a ventricle. It's insane. I mean, we were the generation of Furbies. So I don't know that we're that tall. I will not have a bad word said about Furbies. At least they did stuff. Okay.

I think, I wasn't sure. I think i got one and didn't get the batteries for it or something but if it is a fad that means that at some point drinking water will go out of fashion again i'm sorry on behalf of our sponsors i have to say that is not true and will never be true and that brings us to our final story of today, which is that Instagram has finally decided to take matters into its own hands, no longer standing passively by and witnessing the carnage caused by its own app. It will start to use nudges to suggest to teen users that they log off at night. Hugh, you've been on Instagram at three o'clock in the morning. Can you unpack this story for us yeah so there's a nighttime nudge feature that will prompt teenagers to close instagram

during late hours it's going to pop up if you spend more than 10 minutes on instagram or it's messages late at night i think that's one way to ensure that a teenager stays on Instagram is to tell them to get off Instagram like I don't what what there's a message that says please go to sleep like I know I know to I I know it's time to go to sleep what do you think who do you think I am I know it's time to go to sleep it's a thing called the moon like yeah I just do that yeah. Yeah, like I know I've been on it for too long. Does that stop me? No. It's also in response to this lawsuit that happened in October where 33 attorneys general sued Meta

saying that it targeted children with addictive features, that it was a breeding ground for child sexual abuse, that it encouraged eating disorders and mental illness. And I feel like this response is what you would call the absolute bare f***ing minimum as a as a response the weird thing as well is it's like they say it's for like to prevent child abuse but like all their features have such weird connotation like if i was a teenager and like my young mate was like oh i have to get off instagram my dad's just giving me a nighttime nudge i would call child services immediately and it was it was always stuff like that like I remember back

here my day he had a Facebook it was like a poke it was always like weird weird things I never quite trusted it I think if you were trying to prevent sort of that kind of imagery why are you calling it things like night time nudges and pokes i'm against the whole wording of the whole features that's my biggest thing about it well they're deliberately i mean the whole point of the structure of all of this social media is to break down your inhibitions and your impulse control so that you get addicted to the gambling like features of the app and stay on it for as long as possible uh so it feels like this is at best hypocrisy and at worst uh just trying to put off retribution for a little bit longer on behalf of meta yeah also i don't really like the way they kind of uh use things like that as a way to kind of alienate like because i remember when you were

young you kind of what was cool was not to be controlled by your parents and then you kind of you know like i remember like in back in the myspace days when you had like your top 10 friends was that was that bibo on myspace so you had like your top 10 friends myspace top eight exactly like the amount of friendships i broke as a result of that they were just like just just do more harm than good these features that's that's my input i was never on myspace i was a live journal kid and for people who know what that means it says a lot more about me but the fact that if you recognize what that means it says a lot more about you so you can't you can't get me yeah i know it's

weird it was like it was like there's actually a website where you can go and get your like old bibo and i went on it and it was just the most tragic thing I've ever seen in my entire life I think it was just like new rave version of Kai that I could think I just like forgot out of my brain and I was like I used to be that person it was very tragic this is why the invention of reading and writing was a mistake can't wait for it to go out of fashion again yeah yeah for sure it's coming back in though, coming back in. Yeah, yeah. Big this year, big this year. Yeah, I don't think it will work. I don't think that a nudge will stop a kid being on Instagram. Maybe the feature should be like maybe a filter in which you can see your mum and dad. It's like you have the image of your mum and dad back at you.

So it's like the filter is your own mum and dad. And then you can see it's like, if you make it like an old person, if you make it like old people, get old people involved, and then it won't be cool anymore. So you're like old people stay up all night on Instagram. And they're like, okay, well, maybe it's best for me to log off actually. Could backfire on you. Did with the Stanley Cup is all I'm saying. on Instagram. And they're like, okay, well, maybe it's best for me to log off, actually. Could backfire on you.

Did with the Stanley Cup is all I'm saying. And that brings us to the end of the episode. I'm flipping through the ads at the backside of the magazine. Kai, have you got anything that you want to plug?

Just my Amazon specials still online. So there, just add me on Instagram. I feel bad just promoting my Instagram after just slamming it for the last 25 minutes. But yeah, you can catch me on Instagram. I feel bad just promoting my Instagram after just slamming it for the last 25 minutes. But yeah, you can catch me on Instagram.

I promise I won't give you any nighttime nudges. Not too late, not too late. Not too late, I'll go to sleep. And Huge, what have you got to plug? So I'm at Scythe Theatre in February and March. Yeah, my show, Whodunit. It's good fun, it's nice show. Whodunit. It's good fun. It's nice.

It's about how I killed... Sorry, it's about how I saw someone being killed. And I witnessed it. It's a show about that. But it's funny, though. Loads of jokes. That sounds like the perfect form of slightly traumatic comedy

for a February or March experience. Go along and check that out. The Soho Theatre is always a brilliant place to see comedy. You can find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser It's a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts, blogs, as well as my

weekly writers' meetings and my weekly salons, which is where we all get together in a room and talk about ideas like big nerds. If you go over there and sign up, you probably won't get anything out of me for at least another couple of weeks because I am on maternity leave. But that probably means that you should sign up to my Patreon and support my journey. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser

production. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. Your editor is Ped Hunter. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.