The Gargle - Earth's core | Taliban offices | College embryos

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Nabil Abdulrashid and Tom Neenan join host Alice Fraser for episode 100 (!) of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics!🌍 Earth's core rotation🖥 Taliban bureaucrats👶��� College embryos🚪 E-mobility escape rooms🫖 ReviewsProduced by Ped Hunter and 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

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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. dialogue is reduced to a sad underwater mumble. Frantically, you put the subtitles on because the sound quality is so bad you could be screaming and not even know it. In a flash, the enemy is upon you. You try to cry out, but the words that appear on the screen are just square brackets. The gargle. Close square brackets. This is The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugles Audio newspaper for Visual World. I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Tom Needen and Nabil Abdul-Rashid. How are you? Welcome. Hello.

Hey. I feel like I was more enthusiastic than either of you. No, I was just terrified. You were describing what happened to me yesterday in that intro, so it was uncanny. I was like, oh wow, were you there? And I was like, oh no, that was just another nightmare. I'm from South London. On the inside I'm ecstatic. This is just how much it bubbles over on the outside.

Before we take hands and leap together into the ice-cold water that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front page of the magazine. Noted attention lover and richest proof in the world that you can't buy happiness, Elon Musk has demanded that Twitter's engineers fix his broken levels of audience engagement.

So he's now posing with his tweet about the Super Bowl, which unfortunately got fewer likes than a similar tweet by Joe Biden. Are you, either of you, have you survived Twitter just about um just about it's weird my tweets either get ignored or i get like loads of really angry far-right guys threatening to beat me up um this one guy said he was gonna come to my gig then blocked me i think

he looked at my display pic and decided maybe not. But yeah, that's pretty much how Twitter goes for me. I'm either being ignored or yelled at by angry people. A lot like my childhood. It's the saddest joke I've heard today, Nabil. I'm going to keep them coming. Can I start by just apologising to Nabil because a lot of those

tweets I sent, I was drunk at the time so thank you for joining me That would explain the spelling on all those tweets Stay out of our country, A-R-E Yeah

And breaking news, Mr Wilkes of Booth Road Willoughby has fallen foul of the local librarians league after being found in the children's book section with a magnifying glass trying to discover if Mrs Titmouse really was a mouse with tits and the satirical cartoon this week is the makers of the doomsday clock which measures how close humanity creeps towards apocalypse putting in an application for us to go into penalty time. That's satire about how miserable everything is. I used to get really scared about the Doomsday Clock, and then I realised that it's not actually moving.

Like, it's frozen there. And also, it's only going to go to midnight when we're all dead. Oh, and they can go backwards. They're allowed to go backwards. What's the point of it? It's just a real-time Nostradamus, which ceases to be impressive. Yeah. I mean, regular clocks go backwards too.

I think the solstice and the time of year scales back doomsday, obviously. Yeah. It's just not as impressive. It's like predicting 9-11 on 9-11. I mean, what if it works with the relativity of time and as things change, it changes. So a whole bunch of people become vegan, the clock goes back a bit,

but then Celine Dion decides to release another album, it moves forward you know well uh speaking of things moving in directions that they ought not to move today's top story is that the earth's core may have stopped spinning or may even now be spinning backwards according to a new study that makes me want to cry. Tom Neenan, you've been to the Earth score. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, certainly. That's why I've got a magma hat.

This is news from the Peking University of China. It doesn't work, but it makes me laugh. It's red, but only because it's molten. That's the, yeah, we'll stick with it. Yeah, so this apparently is that they've said that roughly the Peking University of China said that the Earth's core stopped rotating and around 2009, potentially, is when it actually completely stopped. And I don't want to put all the blame squarely on the release of fireflies by Owl City, but that, you know correlation

is not causation and that could have something to do with it. Should we be really scared about this? Is this the kind of thing where Michael Bay has to make a film where he sends the Harlem Globetrotters trains them all to be miners so they can go down into the arse core and get it spinning?

Nobody knows what I'm talking about. I had whistled a theme tune, but I can't. Yeah. Nabil was just miming exactly that, which is, yeah, do we need to put it on our fingers and just get it spinning? Because otherwise, yeah, are we all in serious trouble? What does this mean?

And if it doesn't mean anything, why do we care? That is my question. Does anyone have the answer? I mean, I just saw that story and i thought why why why were you do why were you digging there like what what were you looking for what do you know about the we don't know that's like coming home with your cousins like hey you know some of your underwear has holes in it i'm like yeah well they're the most comfortable pairs but why were you going through my my why were they digging through the earth's core how do we know maybe maybe it's just resting like we you know if you how do they know it hasn't moved since 2009

if they haven't been checking since 2009 and if so what are they looking for like i'm not the most sciency guy but you see in the sci-fi movies this is where things start to go wrong because they end up finding something they shouldn't have found if the planet has indigestion just drop some Gaviscon in there and leave it alone according to this model that they're proposing it kind of spins

one way and then spins the other like when you wind up a globe that's hanging from the ceiling and it goes one way for a while and then it kind of goes a little bit... I don't think that's how it works at all. And in fact, I know that that's not how it works because that metaphor was a terrible one. But basically it goes...

I mean, it's not covered in ants. Apparently it turns back and then it goes... I feel like we've put this on you now and you're trying to explain it in a way that no one else has tried to. So I'm sorry about that. Well, essentially, it's that the Earth's core does change direction. The question is whether it changes once every six years or once every 70 years. And the fact that we don't know, but we have a lot of data, is always upsetting to me.

Because it makes me feel like, like actually sometimes the more you know the more confusing it is like for all i know that the earth's core is just grooving and moving in its own like mood based just attached to some 14 year old's mood ring on the surface it decides to spin on its own recognizance well does it like go in circles like is it the kind of thing where the last time that the earth's core stopped moving, I don't know, World War II happened or something? Like, is there any kind of mystical element to it that we should be aware of?

Is it going to be, I don't know, are we going to see people rising from the dead? I reckon it's something like everyone just has a really bad period but no one talks about it, so you wouldn't know. Go with the flow.

Your ad section now, because you can't be what you can't buy. This week's episode of the podcast is brought to you by IKEA, releasing its range of atomic furniture for the second nuclear age, featuring new office desk, the Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer office furniture. Now I am become desk I'm sorry it's beautiful thank you and today's episode of the podcast is brought to you

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all you need to do is bring your ogling goggles and half a glass of water to fill the bath. She's a small mouse with big tits. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy.

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Everywhere. AAST.com And now it's time for your employment news. And this is the news that having, quote-unquote, won the war, Taliban bureaucrats are not enjoying office life. Nabil, you've worked in an office once before. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes, I worked in an office for the Taliban. I'm joking.

I'm joking. All I'm saying is I understand their frustration, you know, because having worked in an office for a while, I almost went on a jihad. But that's because the hr department were dicks um that side you know these guys are upset you know they miss the old days i just think can you imagine the tension working with former taliban in the office right like can you imagine taliban working online now that is a keyboard warrior that is the definition. Can you imagine having to fire one of them?

You know, Haider, you're not, what are you? You're not being very productive. I didn't work in production. I worked in destruction. Yes, well, you're fired. Okay. Okay, I'm fired, am I? Alright then. I'll be sending you my letter of resignation.

Make sure you open it. A lot of these bureaucrats used to spend their time riding around the countryside on horses, bullying people. And now if they want to bully people, they have to apply to HR for a permission. It's not fair. Tom? Yeah, are you saying that the Taliban used to work in the open air

and now they have to work in offices with small windows? So you're saying that the problem with the Taliban is they now have quite narrow views? Thank you. I love it. They wanted a job and now they've found a job and heaven knows they're miserable now. The Taliban have gone full Morrissey

and I, for one, am here'm here for i think it's wonderful the um basically i i think this is what happens when you get a taliban who are mainly staffed by um millennials they just don't want to sit in the office i find that car bomb triggering etc etc i have to say i prefer the quiet quitting trend in the taliban than the old loud quitting that they used to do the loudest quit it's possible to do the next stop is the emo taliban and i don't think we're ready for that either well they only harm themselves that's the uh that's the real shame. This is my last resort. Boom.

No harm. It's terrible. It's terrible. I worry that this is too political as a story. Ped, can you ring the politics bell? But also, I feel like part of the reason that the gargle avoids politics is because it's very divisive. And I have to say, if you're a pro-Taliban listener, you can apply to HR for permission to go f*** yourself.

Sure. I mean, there will be listeners. They're people who work in an office. They're bound to be listening to podcasts right now. So hello and stop, I guess. You know, they took over the country right remember when they first took over the country and people like oh my god how did the afghan army not stop them they were trained by america and i'm like yeah of course that's why they couldn't stop them the americans taught them to fight the american way which is with drones but when they

left they took the drones with them and just left them with the control pads. You ever play PlayStation with your younger brother, you just give him the dead control pad. Which one am I? The one being shot, mate. So that's how they took over. And now they start playing games on PC in the office. Are you saying Solitaire doesn't quite cut it?

Because I'll have to agree. Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Nabil, what have you brought in for us this week? My daughter's fictitious tea. It's zero calories. It tastes like whatever she says it does.

And it keeps her quiet when you drink it. What could be better? it's not very filling it's not not much energy but hey if you're lactose intolerant it's brilliant for that too so i would give it a three out of five review because she stirs it with plastic corn and like you know i don't care how much of an imagination you have when you watch someone stir a cup of tea with plastic corn it's kind of disturbing she wants to be a chef or a magician again very disturbing i'm drinking magic drinks so yeah i give it a three out of five i hope she can't hear me because i'll be in trouble

i mean either way chef or magician nothing up my sleeves is a good start tom what have you brought in for us? I don't know if we can have some kind of whimsical bed under this because as in sound not any bed I'm in is whimsical Tom here we go

this is a review that looks at how they have poems in all adverts now Sickly ditties written in verse To ease the icky capitalist curse A young woman, kind, a smiling face Often from a regional place Talking lyrically of the amount

She's saving in her gold account They're annoying, cloying, drive me berserk. But I'm talking about them so you know they work. It takes their bank and makes it ours. In a twee way that's evil, no star wars. That was a satire on modern advertising and you're more than welcome. To biotech news now. This is the news that Americans are preparing to test their embryos for their future test results, essentially.

Always fun to reduce children to science. That's essentially your mum squeezing an avocado at a supermarket and going, nope, not ripe enough for Harvard. Nabil, you're contemplating sending your child to university. Can you unpack this story for us a bit? I mean, I read that and I thought, wow. And I thought Nigerian parents were pushy when it came to education. Like, can you imagine how, can you imagine having the genes to go to Harvard and still fail in your exams?

And then your parents just showing you a piece of paper as you as an embryo saying, you see, this is what we were predicting but look at you you can't even measure up to yourself the good thing nigerian like as a nigerian the good thing as a nigerian dad reading this is that it's the embryo not the sperm so if anything goes wrong you can always blame the mom so i think that's that misogyny surely it's only a matter of time i mean this is all nature versus nurture stuff i mean all the the real question of whether a child gets into an ivy league college is about how much self-loathing you manage to imbue them with in their childhood that they feel that they need the external validation of some overpriced college tom if you want to look at an embryo and see if it'll get into a good college then you just need

to know did the parents of the embryo go to that college because that's usually a good sign i think it has a lot more to do with your bank account balance than uh your eggs you know um yeah exactly i'll be crazy you know and if you're gonna do that you should have a bunch so you could you could have like a premier league football test yeah then the nba test heavyweight boxing test and like maybe even a tiktok test you know uh so yeah twat test wait. Is he going to be a famous influencer? I mean, I do think genetics have something to do with academic success.

And I think this purely on the anecdote of a family friend who is the headmaster of a school, quite a fancy school in Austria. And he says that these children come through, the first generation of children uh do really well then the father gets divorced um hooks up with a very attractive but not necessarily quite as intelligent lady and the second round of kids come through and the dad's like why are they not doing as well as the ones from my ex-wife who i met at university why why are they not doing as well

so that's my that's my theory. They're very beautiful, that second batch, but they're not hitting their high grades. If you can afford to have your embryo tested to see if it will go to a good university, it's going to do fine. You've clearly got cash. That child will be fine.

Unless you got the test on Woucher. Well, I mean, that child will not be fine in any way. That child will go to... It's not psychologically,er. Well, I mean, that child will not be fine in any way. That child will go to... It's not psychologically. No, no, definitely not. And now it's time for our e-mobility news. This is the news that Volkswagen has sent 22,000 employees to escape rooms for the best kind of fun, corporate fun.

When I initially read this, I thought, these can't be real escape rooms. They have to be Teslas that you have to get out of before the fire starts. But no, they're genuine escape rooms. Tom, you've driven a car. Can you unpack this story for us? Firstly, incorrect. No, I haven't. I cannot drive.

To me, it's a wondrous bit of magic that people perform that I can only dream of attempting. That's you and most Uber drivers, though. Oh, I am an Uber driver, definitely. No stars. Just putting all your cash in the bank on self-driving cars coming along before you get too old, right?

Oh, my... Well, until they get my first booking. That is the... Yeah, that panic. So, yeah, a bunch of people who were trained in sort of building things and putting things together are now sort of basically being told that they need to work sort of in quite a boring job. Do people work in VW? Are they the Taliban? Is that how this works? Yeah, so it's pretty sad that people get people who got into engineering because they wanted to, you know, they like cars, they like how the internal combustion

engine works, and now sort of being told, oh no, it's mainly maths now, it's mainly maths that you've got to do, and Excel spreadsheets, instead of actually, you know, sort of getting to put a car together, which is a shame, I guess, although if everything's going to be automated soon, and then I guess that's just the way the world world's going although I don't know how escape room is going to help you do that because in my experience um basically escape rooms are just basically I did an escape room uh a while back and I found it one of the most stressful things ever and did not replicate anything I've ever experienced in the real world unless that is trying to escape from a fictional prison uh where a psychopath is going to arrive any minute but

then when you don't get the clues right, actually is delayed and doesn't turn up. Well, it's meant to be a quote unquote playful way to swear its employees to the age of e-mobility. The VW Group is trying to reframe for its employees the concept of no longer building cars, but instead working as data logisticians. I don't know, man. Look, I back VW for a pivot. They have managed to pivot into being the hippie car from being the Nazi car. That's what I was thinking. The Wagen des Volks has become the Wagen of getting high on a road trip.

So, look, I wouldn't count them out. I mean, I got worried when I heard they were sending people into escape rooms because when their founders did that, people generally did not escape. That aside, it's probably easier to get out of an escape room than it is to get out of an electric Volkswagen car. You can't find the handles. What is it about these electric cars and the cryptic puzzle that they do with where they put the handles for the car i don't get it um it also doesn't help

that most electric cars are designed for vegans and i clearly am not one so getting in the car is a problem in the first place and now getting out of it i'm trapped don't mind me i'm just triggered part of this escape room thing seems to be sort of beginning the retraining process and they're suggesting that the training process could last up to 378 days so essentially more than a year of your work will just be forgetting how to build a car and learning how to help a robot build a car. Already I have notes because if training is going to last 378 days, you think, could you not just make it, round it down to a year and just like, I don't know, put a few extra hours in each day or something.

It's just an annoying amount of time because it's just over a year. And I kind of think, well, that's, if you said, oh, training will last a year, I think most people can factor that in. But 378 days is just like it's just irritating i'm only happy with this being uh the way of doing it if they do it the whole training course like it's the maze runner where you think you're just doing a series of increasingly complex puzzles but each one is training a new ability and by the end you'll be able to to fight for volkswagen in the car wars or whatever it is that's coming for us. Up against Tesla.

Yeah. I haven't read Maze Runner. Is that what happens? Is that a spoiler? No, it's not quite a spoiler. Okay. They're testing them. They're trying to build resilience against a virus.

They're using children instrumentally in a way that we don't generally accept, except when we do accept it. It's very good. It sounds a bit like Ender's Game as well a lot of those books quite similar so basically they're taking like all books do or like like all weird companies do they're taking their cues from dystopian novels that basically say if we end up here all society has collapsed and going what if we ended up there that would be good so that i guess that's concerning yeah and all you know all ip is interchangeable all language is just a quotation you know you don't know what an apple is you've

just heard people talking about an apple in other contexts so when you are using the word apple you're just recontextualizing somebody else's intellectual property it's like a quote that i've just come up with now all languages are quotation I know a few comedians that believe in this philosophy as well but yeah naming no names put them all in an escape room that's my new off with their heads you'll be first up against the wall in the escape room

trying to solve the boringest puzzle. The future is a series of increasingly dystopian escape rooms until you realise they're not an escape room, it's just your life. What is a prison but the world's hardest escape room? Yeah, hey guys, let's all try and figure out how to survive the night by catching fish in this polluted sewer but if you say it in that voice it's it's like you're doing it for fun rather than survival just pretend it's a stag do everyone's happy if you kill 50 mutants you can live to see the dawn and you get a special hat.

I don't know how games work. I don't genuinely. I find it really stressful to play games because I don't, I'm compelled to be productive at all times. So if I'm playing a game, I'm like, where's the outcome? Like what are we producing? Can we podcast this? It's not mentally healthy, but, yeah,

I find it genuinely stressful playing most games either because i feel really accountable to the avatar for letting them die because i don't have enough skill or because i hate fun is your next podcast just going to be called peekaboo and it's going to be you playing with children i'd listen i'd listen i mean, yeah, it's very difficult. I'm writing my new show. It's very difficult to defeat my own self-doubt in the face of my child cheekily pretending to eat a crayon as a joke today. Going, um, num, num. And then going, no, that's not for eating.

And her knowing that it's not for eating, but going, um, num, num, num. It's good material. That brings us to the end of the show. I'm flipping through the ads at the back of the magazine. Nabil, have you got anything to plug? Doing a bunch of work in progress shows. It's more fun than touring because I don't have to be funny. And yeah, I've got a documentary

that I've filmed with a bunch of other people coming out in a couple of weeks. They haven't given us an exact date. And I'm hiking through rural Portugal being chased by wild dogs while visiting the holy city for Catholics, Fatima. Oh, that sounds wonderful. Wow. Genuinely, that sounds really lovely. Tom, what have you got to plug? The Haunting Series 2 is currently being repeated on Radio 4.

I think we've done, there's been two episodes out and the third one's out next week. So you can get all those on BBC Sounds. And we've got a, we've recorded a short for Sky, which is, I think, due out in March. I think I can say that. I think it's been announced. But that's called Silo

and I think that'll be out on Sky and also they'll be putting those on YouTube so you can watch those. So be sure to look at my Twitter and stuff and I'll be posting links to those when they become available. Oh, and my Twitter is at TNeenan. Otherwise, that's pointless

me saying any of that. And a big thank you to our roving reporters this week. C. Lips, who sent in the Earth's Inner Core and College Embryos story. Danny Rosnablay and Abdo, who sent in the Taliban bureaucrat story. If you would like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, tweet us at HelloGogglers with stories that you think would be good for this show. You'll find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

It's a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials podcasts and blogs which you can get there for free as well as my weekly tea with alice salons which you have to subscribe to be part of or my weekly writers meetings where we do a workshop if you're writing something and want me to tell you it's shit um or good sometimes i say it's good i am on tour with my new show, Twist, starting on the 28th of February in Adelaide. I will be then in Melbourne at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival at Trades Hall. I will be in Tokyo on the 18th of May at the Tokyo Comedy Cafe. Then I will be in London and then I will be in Edinburgh.

So keep an eye out for that. I have also launched season two of my podcast Tea with Alice, which is me having tea with interesting people and talking about difficult topics. I did 300 episodes and then I took a year off. And so now this is season two. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Pet Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including The Bugle,

Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.