The Gargle - Friendzone | Groundhog | Clumpy universe

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

John-Luke Roberts and Eleanor Morton join host Alice Fraser for episode 99 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - with no politics!👫 Friendzone lawsuit🦦 Groundhog found dead🌌 Less clumpy universe💻 Tech elite hates workers 🔑 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. which is like a normal face, but a bit creepy. Imagine those Hollywood stars who have gone too far and look like facial meat slabs. Marginally more convincingly human than that, but still a little off, you know. The once boundless skies now host massive anti-grav cities, towers piercing the stratosphere, reaching towards the vastness of space.

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The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The Hello. Hello, thank you. Thank you. I wasn't thanking you, Eleanor. I was John Luke Roberts. Welcome. Hello. Hello, thank you.

Thank you. I wasn't thanking you, Eleanor. I was thanking the host, actually. We can all thank each other. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Alice. We exist in mutual interdependence as part of a community, a small community within a wider community. Podcast is a subset of comedians,

although really the Venn diagram overlap between podcasters and comedians is a circle. It is a subset of comedians, although really the Venn diagram overlap between podcasters and comedians is a circle. It's a circle. Before we turn on our recording devices and podcast into the future of our top stories this week, let's have a look at the front cover. The front cover this week is Leonardo DiCaprio's new, and I do mean new, 19-year-old girlfriend. It is a funny thing to see the outrage online because, of new, and I do mean new, 19-year-old girlfriend. It is a funny thing to see the outrage online because, of course, it doesn't affect him. He's old enough that he doesn't know how the internet works. And he's also old enough that when he was young, it was still considered okay for a man in his 50s to date a 19-year-old.

For context, in case you weren't horrified, that means she was 12 when Trump was elected. And her high school prom was probably on Zoom because of covid she is over the age of consent let's be clear she is over the age of consent though if you use the phrase not technically illegal too much you turn into woody allen to be fair he is just irresistibly attracted to old souls specifically old souls encased in hot bodies controlled by the brains of teenage girls. Our satirical cartoon this week is Lloyds of London, the boss of Lloyds of London, warning that the UK's financial reputation has been dented by the last couple of years of bad financialness, pointing out that its reputation was built on transactional fairness laws that privilege business deal-making and centuries of just nicking stuff from other countries to fuel the relentless expansion of a bloated aspirational middle class

and friend's own news now uh this is the news that a singapore man has sued a woman um for just wanting to be friends eleanor morton you just want to be friends with me can you unpack this story? Sure, yeah. So this man, as far as I can tell, this man in Singapore was very upset that a woman, a friend of his, didn't want to go any further with the friendship than friendship. And how dare she? Because as we know, women's intrinsic value is only sexual. And being friends with a woman is rubbish, as i'm sure john luke can attest so he

uh he's taking her to court for i think it's emotional damages that's that's uh something like that and he wants to sue her for uh about 1.87 million english pounds or um the singapore equivalent you know what i love what? I love the confidence. I love the confidence. And apparently he's got emotional trauma. And, you know, if he wins this, this means we can all just start, you know, taking people to court for whatever we like,

which I'm not opposed to. Well, I don't think he will win. He's been dismissed previously as suggesting that the claim has an ulterior motive of vexing or oppressing the defendant. No, I don't think so. No. Apparently, they have been friends since 2016. In 2020, they became misaligned about how they saw their relationship. While the defendant only regarded this guy as a friend, he considered her his closest friend, which is dangerous territory if any of you have a closest friend.

Because that's, you know, all relationships are linear along a graph heading towards bone town. And it's just a matter of how fast you're moving with the barista down the corner or the guy who you just caught catch the bus with it's exhausting i mean my closest friend is john roberts and i assume that eventually we will marry and uh if he doesn't want to do that i will sue him so yeah the difficulty is of course we share a therapist and i I think if we get married, we probably have to get different therapists. No, we'll get couples, couples therapists. No, I'm going to divert the rail we're on to Bowtown to a different track. I'm going to make my own trolley problem. That has caused me emotional trauma by implying that not everyone would want to be my closest friend i mean all friendzone problems are the trolley problem right it's the train is going in one direction and you

got to decide whether you touch the lever or not yeah how many people's lives do you ruin nice for anyone who's um euphemistically disabled that instance, the lever was a stand-in for the penis. Oh, I got it now. Wait, but isn't it a third party who's throwing the lever? You are the third party. Oh, okay. Yeah. You can either sue your friend or keep creeping them out.

Is that the options? Is that the options? You could do both. Yeah. The judgment said that she'd spent years, quote, massaging the claimant's unhappiness, end quote, but is now standing up to his threats. And, of course, unhappiness is what penis is short for.

Sounds good to have a punner. He also, he's suing her because he says that this has damaged his stellar reputation. That's the stellar reputation. This is Kay Corshigan is the name of the guy here, who I had no idea about before he launched this particular legal action. Thus, ensuring his reputation is much wider than it was previously and much, much worse. Yeah, one might argue that this is uh there's a very public example of what he does privately in his bedroom which is called a cell phone hey i've been

working through recently with our shared therapist like working through the shame i have at being a man so i'd like um to thank the gargle for introducing me to this story and really testing the progress that i've made but doesn't it make make you feel good that you've never tried to sue a woman for this? Oh, Eleanor, it's only a matter of time, isn't it? I mean, you can't... I'll wake up one morning, there'll be the papers there, and go, oh God, what did I do last night? I sued a woman.

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half a glass of water, but it's actually half of a glass completely full of water. Half a glass of water. Legally different from half a glass of water. 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

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John Luke Roberts, you have recurring days can you unpack this story? Yes, so in Quebec there's this old tradition I don't know if you know about it where in America and North America they pick a groundhog up and if it sees its own shadow, that means that there's six more weeks of winter. It's a kind of Jungian tradition.

And how dare they call us whimsical when they're doing shit like that? Yeah. How dare they? Yeah, I know. And if it doesn't see it, it's early spring. And it gets more whimsical, Eleanor, because Quebec's, this groundhog is called Fred la Marmotte, which translates as Fred the Marmot. And they went in to get him, to bring him out, and he was discovered dead. I would like to stress they didn't pick up the corpse and hold it aloft in front of the crowd, which would have been worse.

Oh, and it happened in the Parc de l'Equipe, in Val d'Espoir, which is near Gaspé, which is, of course, what the crowd did when they heard the news. Yes. So having found the dead groundhog, they couldn't then get the groundhog to see his shadow or not. Although I think that counts as the groundhog not seeing his shadow. No, no, no, no. Or I guess it could be seeing his shadow or not although i think that counts as the groundhog not seeing his shadow no no no no or i guess you could be seeing his shadow too closely yes so i mean this is what they have to do they have to see if they're they have to track this back they have to get like a good detective on the case like the one in knives out uh daniel craig you have to get daniel craig on

the case uh to track if there are six more weeks of winter in which case you will know what killed the groundhog which was the terror of seeing its own shadow. Ah, I see. Well, because they did get a child who had a hat on, a groundhog hat on, they got the child to come up and predict whether it would be six more weeks of winter or an early spring, which seems

to me to be sort of, I know, sort of damning that child, like, look what happened to the last one to do this. You're next. Trail of children and rodents. Sorry, just to clarify, was the hat the child wearing the dead groundhog? Maybe he was gifted the dead groundhog at the end. I don't know.

I'm really enjoying the article, which I think is the Montreal blog, because the headline is, Quebec's where the groundhog was found dead on groundhog day he could never have predicted this is gonna sound harsh i don't actually think he can predict dead or alive well i know i know it's controversial but also i like the idea that that the groundhogs can predict almost anything but you only ever use them to predict whether they're going to be six more weeks of winter. It's too dangerous. It's too dangerous to get in to do other stuff. You don't want them to put up the lottery like that octopus that did it.

The only thing that seers can't see is their own death. Oh, yeah. Is that true? I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's true in the fiction books that I read about seers. Is that a true myth that's true? It's a real lie that some people have told, that enough people have told that it's become a sort of a canonical thing

in the vague ether of shared conceptual frameworks that people tap into when they write their uninspired fantasy novels. Is it a bit like the ravens in the tower? In what way could it be like the crows and the ravens? Well, because when the ravens in the tower leave, that's meant to be bad. And one of them did die the other year. And there's only eight of them.

So when the groundhog dies, the weather stops. There will be no more weather. Oh, God. This is what every climate change scientist has been praying for. We can't solve this through technology, but we can solve this through strategic groundhog murder. We need to stop putting so much faith in animals to predict the way it's going to go for us as a species.

I don't think they know. Is it cows who, like, they lie down when it's going to rain or stand up when it's not? Oh, that's not true. Isn't it? It's not true. Isn't it? I mean, they do stand up and sit down.

Well, I'm half right then. It doesn't say anything apart from that cow is tired or that cow is... Have you monitored them? Have you monitored them? No. Or have you just decided, well... No, and you can't prove anything so no no but I have a very cynical

conservationist father who likes to tell me about how all of these things are nonsense so crush all my dreams of whimsical animal predictions what's he think about the great reset theory? what's the great reset? what's the great reset? what's the great reset?

the great reset happens when a jew sees his own shadow it's the big conspiracy it's the new one it's the new world order thing it's the one that's going now it's the you know i can't keep up it was space lasers now it's there's so much anti-semitism at the moment and you know i've got you know holocaust survivors in my background so i may be slightly paranoid but i did just watch a cake baking show in which the first episode uh was like quite an unpleasant jewish mother planning a cake for her incredibly um greedy son his for his bar mitzvah and then the second episode was like a gorgeous uh palestinian couple who were like having their baby announcement after a long

time trying to get pregnant and i thought this is anti-semitic well hang on but which bit the filming of the planning of or the existence the casting the casting i think the existence of these people yeah Sometimes you just meet someone and you're you, sir, are anti-Semitic. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's all very sad. It's very difficult to also to engage in this. Basically, we should just let you, Alice, make all these jokes

and we should sit making no negative or positive voices. Yeah, just sort of laughing in a way that suggests we support you uh but we're not laughing with you unless that's what you want uh in which case yes yeah we're not laughing with you if it confirms your own uh damaging ideas exactly yeah yeah yeah this is self-loathing then do we know the religion of the groundhog do we know the religion of the groundhog whether it was pandering to the mainstream i don't know is it part of a wider conspiracy if it was uh you know why did they want the groundhog dead yeah maybe the religion of the groundhog um would be born again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again

oh no i've got the letters and now it's time for your reviews. Your review section now. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Eleanor Morton, what have you brought in for us to review? I'm going to review the price of milk. It's too high. It's too damn high. Do you know the price of milk? I ask

you like you're a politician. I'm going to be found out as someone who doesn't drink milk uh yes and it is atrocious a pint is now a pound for a pint for a wee for a wee one in the scot mid across from me uh i should clarify but that is that is a 200 rise from last time I checked milk which is maybe about 10 years ago so that's really bad it's pretty bad that is pretty bad

I was speaking to someone the other day who was Swiss and had been asked at his English girlfriend's Christmas to go out and buy 10 pounds of cheese and bought 10 pounds weight of cheese. Oh, my God.

Which was too much cheese. 10 pounds of cheese is one block of cheese at the moment. Yes, but 10 weights of cheese is a lot of cheese. A lot of cheese. I don't know. You can get through a lot of cheese if you really want to. I'm going to tell you a story now. Yeah.

It's about the really want to part of that sentence, which is as teenagers we went on a holiday to Italy and then we were flying back and my dad's friend Renzo gave us a very large block of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Sort of one of those could have, you know, he had a deli person in his family and had access to wholesale quantities of Parmigiano Reggiano. And as we began the descent into Sydney, dad realized that he had not put it into our checked baggage and also it would not pass through the Australian biosecurity.

They said any dairy you have to dump or declare. And dad i don't think he understood the declare part of that and he decided that what we needed to do was eat no uh this very large block of parmigiano reggiano which um let me tell you after after 24 hours in the air massively dehydrated the last thing you want to be eating in chunks is the driest cheese ever invented it's not a chunk cheese it's not a chunk cheese i know this chunk consumption it's a great it's a grating cheese genuinely the memory is so burned into my memory that my tongue shrivels when i tell the story i can remember the feeling of just rasping dry sandpaper cheese how many stars one one star John Luke what have you brought in for us right uh well on Sunday I left my house to go to my

circuit training session which I do because I'm very healthy and and do things like that for my health and I I grabbed my keys and I grabbed my wallet and I left my phone'm very healthy and and do things like that for my health and I I grabbed my keys and I grabbed my wallet and I left my phone in the flat and I left and I went to this place and then I did the thing and then I an hour later came out and I went and I bought a cup of coffee and then I returned to my front door and I took the keys out of my pocket and in my hand the keys transformed not into my keys but into another set of keys that i was looking after for somebody else um and in that sort of the next 20 30 seconds of comprehension that that i had not taken my keys out of my flat but i pulled the door closed behind me

and it dawned on me that i was locked out so i was locked out of my flat so i'm going to review the process of being locked out of one's flat. And actually, it might surprise you how this one goes. My neighbour very kindly let me phone the locksmith from his phone. And in the next hour of waiting for the locksmith, I didn't have my phone. I was outside walking through the park. I felt so mindful, so in the moment. And I wasn't able to look at my phone for anything so really the act of being locked out uh gave me a great sense of presence and well-being

um and then the locksmith was an hour and a half late and I had to try and keep that sort of nice it didn't work I got more and more anxious he finally turned up and in one minute he just drilled through the door and then got a little coat hanger type thing and and and pulled it pulled it open let me in um so in the end uh there's things i gained from being locked out my house the first one being the experience of having been locked out my house and the things that i lost um from being locked out my house which was largely the act of being locked out my house so i will give being locked out of your house three stars out of five i've learned so much which is that if i if i ever forget my keys what i need to remember is a drill yeah i think you need some sort of well i would say training but really it did just need to stick it in and sort of poke it around until it opened so i think you could

probably do it by chance less clumpy universe news now and this is the news that the universe might be less clumpy than we thought it was and that the fact that it's less clumpy would indicate the existence of mysterious forces god question mark probably not exclamation mark john luke can you unpack this story for us well yes and no i can reiterate that yes the universe has been found to be less clumpy than expected. And that's been done by scientists working for the Dark Energy Survey, which sounds villainous. Let's be honest here. And the South Pole telescope. Don't know why they need the telescope for the South Pole. It's really big. You could see it with your naked eye.

But what I don't understand, this seems to me to be kind of the problem, because this news, they say it's like surprising. It came as no surprise to me because I had no preconceptions about the clumpiness or otherwise of the universe. And it does seem to point to a gulf really between the sophistication and complexity of scientific understanding and what the lay people can understand,

which has resulted in a new story telling us, so the universe is kind of, so it's a bit, I guess the way we put it is less, it's clumpy. It's less clumpy, yeah. They might as well have been saying like, oh, the universe is not nearly as grouchy as we thought, or like, it's a bit more slatted,

you know, goofier, goofier than we were expecting. So this is the news. Yes, the universe is less clumpy. That's the word they settled on for what they think that we common people can understand um but my favorite thing is there's three explanations for why the universe has turned out to be less clumpy one of which is the scientific model is completely wrong uh a second one is a bit of the scientific model is a bit wrong and the third one is there's a problem with the equipment and i like number three look i think you're missing the very important fourth one the universe is wrong and we are correct i'm gonna sue the universe because i thought we were going to have a really

special closest relationship and the universe is really like the universe is really treating me badly i'm gonna sue the universe for trauma i like the way they frame it as a crack could be opening up between theoretical predictions and what's actually going on in the universe, which implies sort of more danger inherent in our wrongness about the universe. But actually, there are no implications to the theoretical wrongness about the universe. We can just be wrong for as long as we want. We could be so wrong from the beginning to the end, all of our predictions could be based on falsehoods and the implications of that for the

universe are nothing there's no point at which the universe goes i feel seen no but maybe that is it but right i'm gonna bring in some like i don't know if you know i'm a trained clown and in the clown world i think i might be able to explain this they say that so your clown your inner clown is what it's the thing people find funny about you and maybe laugh about you behind your back and that's where you're funniest it's the thing about you which is funniest and and once you find that and you do that on stage and then people laugh at you doing that but there's a particular kind of clown thing that once you know what your clown is it's no longer funny you have to change it so maybe as we are the universe's way of considering

itself the closer we get to understanding the universe the universe then changes its rules because it can't it doesn't want to it no longer works once we understand what it is that's what that's my clown theory of that's my uni universal clown theory clown string theory. Clown silly string theory. Clown silly string theory. Yeah. High five. Shocked that. High five. High five. A little flower squirt at you if you Dutch man. I think if I was the universe, I'd be pretty annoyed to be described as clumpy.

But as we also pointed out, there is no difference that that makes to us as all the universe. Is what you mean that you, Eleanor Morton, would be pretty annoyed to be described as clumpy. Yeah, if I was the universe. Oh, if you were the universe. I used to say I'm not. Just if you were the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay. So you wouldn't be annoyed if somebody described you as clumpy. And also, as Eleanor Morton, I would also be upset to be described as clumpy. In many ways, Eleanor, you are the universe. Oh, thank you. Wait, you call me clumpy? Now it's time for our tech news.

This is more of an opinion section. This is unpacking the news that the tech industry as a whole is just going on an absolute firing spree, blaming workers for wanting too much money or too many rights. Eleanor Morton, you've used a computer. Can you unpack this story a little for us? What I can gather from it as a non-tech person is that Elon Musk's Twitter rampage, firing rampage,

has sort of propped up this view that everyone in tech is actually really selfish and lazy and should all be fired and we could all run things much better without all these extra people doing their jobs and um as we've seen from the new twitter that is absolutely true uh it has been a smooth smooth ride so i guess it's this this fear that we're all going to be replaced by machines, which is coming true. But then also that's not because they're better than us. It's because people hiring people are worse at being bosses. Well, basically, there was a massive surge in the tech industry during the pandemic when everyone was locked inside and could only engage through technology.

And so they did a massive hiring spree. And then the pandemic ended and it turns out that people wanted to see the sunlight once more. inside and could only engage through technology and so they did a massive hiring spree and then the pandemic ended and it turns out that people wanted to see the sunlight once more uh so they didn't need as many employees you can you can have a surge in hiring and then firing or let people go or whatever downsize if you have to just don't blame the workers for wanting money it's all part of this quite quitting thing isn't it which is a terrible phrase where people are now saying they're only going to do their actual job instead of all the extras that they are meant to do for free, which is not quitting. That's just doing a job. But because our society is so weirdly capitalist, just doing your job is considered not doing enough.

And bosses are very upset about paying people to do their jobs is what I've gathered from that um I don't know it's not a world I move in so I don't understand any of it world of jobs world of jobs humans seem to be the problem is the view view. Like having a human workforce is the issue. The AI stuff seems to be doing the same kind of thing. It's taking creativity and going, we could just do this through a program rather than have humans be.

So you're taking away like the ability to work or the jobs that are all there. And then you take away the things you would do in your spare time if you do work and you give them to the robots as well. So it's heading towards a sort of layer of executives and then everyone else doing absolutely nothing, either for themselves or for the capitalist structure,

and just sort of sitting there watching all these other things and then sharing all these other things. I don't understand this story. No, we don't. We're artists No, we don't. We're artists. We can't comprehend. We're artists. We don't know what tech is. It's a bunch of very wealthy people deciding that workers are entitled,

feeling that the workers have an entitled attitude towards compensation when they generally, as a class, are the people who've been spending just ridiculous amounts of money on this weird startup gambling thing where they all just over hype products that don't have any real function in the hope that one of them will become facebook and then just flush it down the toilet and move on to the next one and then they invented cryptocurrency it's fun that all these people like zuckerberg and like musk who have sort of made this claim to be incredibly sort of intelligent and forward-seeing be able to pull these things off

have been revealed by their next things that they do to have completely relied on chance to have been lucky enough to have the money in the first place to invest in these things and to get the thing and good pr comes away and runs and good pr when will will PR be dehumanised? When will that be handed over to AI? Has that already gone to AI? Long ago. Some of the most artificial people I know work in PR. This is all funny because it's what we thought the future was going to be.

We thought, well, first of all, the Industrial Revolution happened and everyone, the working class, got their jobs taken by robots. And now they're coming from the middle class jobs. And in both instances, that sounds more exciting than it is. That's just quite mundane and depressing. And then instead of all the robots doing our jobs and us being able to just like leisurely sit around and make art and things, we just all get fired and don't have any money. But then also there's this idea that like,

why would we create stuff when AI can do it? Because those people only see the product. None of this is funny, by the way. Because those people only see the product. They don't see the process of creating art as part of why it's good because they're not artistic people. So they can't picture why you'd want to do any of that for fun.

They're also not artistic people because they can't distinguish between what's produced by do any of that for fun. They're also not artistic people because they can't distinguish between what's produced by an artificial intelligence and what's produced by people. What's produced by an artificial intelligence is a mean or average of the stuff that it has aggregated. You know, a slightly complicated version of a mean or average, but the vast majority of things that people make are shit.

So any mean or average is going to be boring shit like and then also the speed at which ai generates stuff means that the boring shit is very soon going to outpace the good and bad shit that fed it and it will just be boring shit replicating boring shit until uh it drowns in its own sameness oh wouldn't it be exciting if it all just ends with like one face, that this all comes, there's one figure that is made out of this thing and all the art that's churned out just turns into this like, to this face and we start, and then the face speaks.

What does it say? And gives us the mundane answer to everything. It tells us how that groundhog died. Tells us how the groundhog, and suggests we get half a glass of water. This is the end of the show. I'm flipping through the ads at the back. Eleanor, what have you got to plug? I am doing the Leicester Comedy Festival

at the end of the month and I have to take four trains to get there so I'd really appreciate if people of Leicester showed up. That'd be really nice and we'll have a great time. And then also I'm doing some various other dates around the UK throughout the next

few months so it's all on my Twitter and if you are living in various towns in England not Scotland then please come to those shows. Excellent John Luke

what have you got to plug? Thank you for calling me excellent John Luke I am going to plug I'm taking my solo me excellent, John Luke. I am going to plug. I'm taking my solo show, A World Just Like Our Own Butts, on tour around the world,

which I mean in two specific locations. I'm doing it at Leicester this weekend on the 12th and then Soho Theatre 13th through 15th of February. And then I am going to Australia to perform at the Adelaide Fringe at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and also doing my show Cabaret Pedimenta so why not come to those shows do come to those shows I feel I feel very jealous of you bringing a polished and honed show to the Adelaide Fringe Festival I will be bringing a brand new show to the Adelaide Fringe Festival from the 28th of February to the 4th of March.

It's called Twist. Also, find me online at patreon.com slash alisfraser. That's one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, which you can get there for free, my podcasts, my blogs, my weekly Tea with Alice salons, and my writers' meetings. If you want to come write with me, patreon.com slash alisfraser. Thank you to our roving reporters, Rob Maher and Boz Aster, who sent in the Friend Zone story,

Sea Lips, who sent in the Less Clumpy Universe story, and James VT, who sent in the Groundhog story. If you would like to be a roving reporter, tweet us at HelloGogglers on Twitter while it lasts. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.

You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.