The Gargle - Mechanical Turks | Embryos | Apple rights

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Pledge now to bring the D'Ancey LaGuarde Reader book to life! http://l8r.it/DHhGBuy tickets to The Gargle Live at the Edinburgh Fringe FestivalTue 15 and 22 AugustGo to https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/live🦈 Attenborough attack🤖 Mechanical Turks🧫 Synthetic embryos🎙 Podcast grifters🍏 Apple rights🗣 ReviewsKai Samra and Tiff Stevenson join host Alice Fraser for episode 117 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.Produced 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. Dancy Lagarde fans, you will be thrilled to know a book is coming out if you fund it via Unbound. We are publishing The Dancy Lagarde Reader by Alice Fraser and Dancy Lagarde, a glorious insight into the world of Dancy Lagarde, self-published romance maven and online bestseller. If you would like to find out how to support it,

go to thebuglepodcast.com. If we get enough support, we will publish the book. That's a real thing that's going to happen. thebuglepodcast.com to support the Dancy Lagarde reader. This is a podcast from the Bugle. The raven throne looms in the darkness of the empty throne room. The decadent glamour of the court has retired for the evening to lurk in its richly decorated rooms and scheme quietly over expensive wine. In the abandoned throne room, a soft noise echoes through the dark. A shadow shifts almost imperceptibly and then detaches itself from the wall and moves in towards the throne. One step, two steps. Suddenly a scraping roar and flames run along the channels

built into the sides of the hall. Candles light themselves and suddenly the shadow in the raven throne is illuminated, showing a hawk face and deeply sunken eyes. Were you sitting there the whole time? At last, he sighs, I've been waiting for the gargle. This is The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World. I'm your host Alice Fraser and your guest

editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Kai Samra. Welcome! Hello! And Tiff Stevenson. Hello! Hi! We have a video version of this now up online which means that there will be some people who are able to see that you are wearing

horizontal stripes Tiff and vertical stripes kai it's almost as though we coordinated this yeah we actually did to be fair yeah we had a quick phone call i was like can i have the horizontal because they actually are more slimming and kai said he would f**k me up up if I tried to wear horizontal stripes. Yeah, I mean, this is stripes, Tiff. Come on. It's not a laughing matter. Before we launch ourselves headfirst into the ball pit that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover. The front cover of the magazine this week is David Attenborough, who has, at 98 years old, finally been made an officially endangered species.

He's posing provocatively with his consistent care for the planet. Good old David Attenborough. The sea is fighting back. It seems to be the theme of the news of the last few weeks. We had Gladys the Orca leading her pod in attacks against boats. Gladys the Orca leading her pod in attacks against boats. And now Sir David Attenborough's film crew being attacked by sharks on a six-day trip to an island north of Hawaii. They were shooting footage of an albatross's maiden flight,

which seems to me to be, you know, how did they know the albatross was a maiden? But, you know, don't you think of all of the people that anyone could attack david attenborough's film crew is the last that any creature on earth should attack because they're the only people who are fighting in your interests well you're following an albatross you're already doomed aren't you it wasn't an albatross a sign that that a ship was going to sink or that something bad was going to happen. I see you killed an albatross because albatrosses were good luck. Right.

Oh, okay. Okay. There's a lot of shark stuff in the news recently and simultaneously an attempt to rebrand shark attacks. So I'm thinking of applying for the job as shark PR because they were like, can we rebrand these? Could you not say it was a frenzied attack?

Could you say you were lovingly lacerated? And also, could you not refer to them as prehistoric? They find that quite ageist. Sharks aren't into it. Also, I think dolphins have had amazing PR for years and years and years and dolphins are bad bitches. And I talked about this in my stand-up, but I they're upset because uh they don't want sharks getting good PR they call them no reverse but to be fair I read that they went out in a blow-up on a blow-up boat

like I don't know it's gonna be honestly your bosses are sending you into like shark infested waters in an inflatable boat they kind of want you. Like, I feel like this is just a really extravagant new plan from the BBC, just to sort of cut down on staff costs. Just like, should we do official layoffs? No. Redundancies? No. Let's just turn all the underperforming staff into fish food. That's what we'll do. It's a crazy thing.

But also, at the risk of, like, offending everyone here, I don't know why David Atwood gets so much love. I don't know what he does. I feel like he just talks... Like, because he doesn't do any of the stuff he doesn't film any of the stuff he just talks oh he's he's 98 years old yeah to be fair he must be the only white guy who spent a lifetime working at the BBC and still kept his reputation intact so I'm gonna argue with the this with you on this I'm a big David Attenborough fan i uh like he'd earned his stripes you know there's footage of him you know on on very very very very early black and white uh cameras you

know approaching extremely hostile groups of animals with just sort of a benevolent british attitude of like hi hello tiger yeah that's just pure british that's what all the british did back in the day just going up to lincoln's just like i belong here and it's like he's managed to get away but to be fair like i said he's kept his reputation intact after a lifetime in the bbc so if that doesn't deserve a knighthood i don't know what does to be fair i like the idea of attenborough going up to lions and asking them why they aren't queuing without making it about british stuff giving tea to giraffes I feel like the biggest personal tragedy of my life is that he didn't take the short window uh after Prince Philip's

death to marry the queen oh that would have been national treasure and national was national treasure squared ask Nicholas Cage I don't know I think it's coming out in 2026 yeah that's an episode of don't tell the bride i definitely do want to say to be fair and now it's time for your ads are you haunted by your horrible past the sins you regret but can never escape atonement at best a judeo-christian fiction at worst a petty footnote in a history written in blood. Try distracting yourself with a brightly coloured monthly SOG subscription from KnitKit, 100% natural fibres to keep your feet warm, fungus-free and soak up any blood from any mistakes you might be making right now. Like the specificity of right now.

Like Alice is just mopping up blood. Well, I like to listen to my podcast while I'm going about my daily chores. Maybe your daily chores are doing horrible, regrettable things. I don't know. Tick them off your to-do list and then you feel a sense of achievement along with your sense of shame. And today's show is brought to you by creepy museums that aren't really museums.

They're just a weird person's house who owns a lot of similar things that's a place that you can go on a weekend creepy museums that are just someone's house your entrance fee is paying for someone's divorce and even more racist dolls and imagine a world far from ours a water world a post-apocalyptic world riven by conflicts generations old. Imagine that in your hand. 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... 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 slightly involved story involving AI, which is the news that AI being trained on human-generated content in some instances may be being trained on AI-generated content. So there's a company called Mechanical Turk, which is meant to create content that then is a training base for AI. And it turns out about 30% of the content it's creating is created itself by AI, that the workers are cheating using robots. Kai Samra, you've stared into the eyes of an unliving creature. Can you unpack this story for us?

So basically, this is, like you said, it's basically AI automating Turk workers, which I didn't know what Turk workers was. And it's basically people workers that do things that AI find difficult to do, like circle an object in a photo or identifying the sentiment of a sentence or resisting the urge to take over the human race, that sort of thing.

And like, the thing is, I'm not surprised because like humans are just late. Like whenever I write an email nowadays, I'll essentially just hand my fist down at the keyboard at approximately where the right letters are. And if the laptop hasn't automatically spelled check it to perfection, I'm basically chucking it in the bin. So I'm absolutely not surprised by this.

But I also feel like, obviously there's a lot of AI talk in the news recently. I just feel like we're in the really boring prequel era of like an 80s sci-fi film. Like in the Terminator, it just goes straight to Skynet taking over like the global military weapons system. And like we're at the really boring prequel bit

where Skynet has just worked out how to select all the images of traffic lights and a capture test, that sort of thing. Like until it's able to like go into a biker bar and nick somebody's clothes and say, hasta la vista. I'm kind of bored by it all, but also very scared as well about what's going to come. Well, I would so much rather Arnold Schwarzenegger

standing in my window with a shotgun than what happens now at the window of my car, which is just various beeping noises telling me I'm doing things wrong. Yeah, I know, very patronising AI. That's the one thing I don't like about it. Forget the aggression, I know, very patronising AI. That's the one thing I don't like about it. Forget the aggression, it's just a patronising manner of it all. Did you mean? We didn't know that, you know, especially with the technology in cars,

that it was going to get... I think when we thought the technology for cars became more and more advanced, it would be exciting, it would be like kit, you know, but I just spend my days screaming Mercedes and Alexa, which actually, you know, makes me feel like as someone who just went to a crappy comprehensive, like I'd gone to a posh girl school, shouting at Alexa and Mercedes all day long.

But yeah, my car tells me, I used to have a car that said, when I was running out of petrol, it said I had limited range, which I took as an insult as an actress. And now I've got a car that if you, when I was running out of petrol, it said I had limited range, which I took as an insult as an actress. And, uh, and now I've got a car that if you,

if I put my handbag, this is how I know I carry too much crap around with me. I'll put my handbag on the passenger seat and it registers as a person. It keeps trying to get me to put the seatbelt on the handbag. So, you know, sometimes the technology hinders us more than more than helps us but i do i i'm well the interesting thing about this is that we you know we've been working for google

for years that's what google capture was it was kind of done as a prove you're not a robot prove you're not a robot by by clicking on this and and that was supposed to be an enhanced layer of of uh security for us but a friend of mine who works in tech was like oh no no this is us doing a job for them this is us teaching the machines how to recognize a traffic light how to recognize a bicycle how to recognize a boat so we're teaching them and simultaneously as humans we're becoming less self-aware like as life goes on because we're just putting any old crap up online and on Instagram and our 57th selfie of the day whilst the machines are becoming more self-aware. I feel like I'm such a sucker for that. I feel like anything to give away my details.

I'm like, Pokemon Go. That's great. Take all my details. And then I don't really feel like I've any right to complain, to be fair. And also, this is the thing, they're training us as much as anything else. We think that we're training them, but actually they're training us. Do you think any natural human would list a shoe as like baby toddlers, kids, boys, girls, lightweight, breathable, breeze, knits, leakers,

non-slip air cushion soles, slip-on shoes, secure transaction? Like what? This is not natural. This is robots training us to help them do what they need to do in order to get money from us which they don't even want that's i've heard you say stuff like that at a party alice don't lie to me that's a great way actually to get rid of someone you don't want to talk to yeah i'm just a girl looking for man, 42, strong jawline. Polyethylene plastic.

Does anyone know the etymology behind the phrase mechanical Turks? Is there a... Yes, it was originally, I think, a steam-driven humanoid sort of robot thing that would do a series of humanoid-type things. It's like a Victorian-era sideshow thing, a mechanical Turk, and so it would play the piano or seem to drink a glass of water. I love how even the mechanical workers are immigrants. Just like, let's get a Turk on.

Eventually all of the jobs jobs whenever you hear anyone kind of complaining about immigration that is you know they're coming over here they don't speak the language and you're like oh the the machines from china you've just bought in to do the self-service checkout like eventually eventually machines will take all of the jobs from all of us and then are we going to be working for the machines one day? I mean, this is the whole point of Terminator, right? I just feel like it's so depressing that we've gotten from a world in which like the Jetsons' idyllic future possibility was the idea that robots would do all of the tasks and people would be able

to just chill out and now the idea of robots taking our jobs fills us with dread because we know for a fact that instead of living like a Jetsons-like futuristic bliss life, we'll be thrown onto the rubbish heap of history. And 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. Tiff, what have you brought in for us this week?

I've brought in an import from basically from America. But having spent some time in Los Angeles, you may have heard me talking before about a certain type of woman from Los Angeles who talks like her voice is running out of batteries. They call it the vocal fry because men find it sexy when you sound like you're on 20 percent please plug me in so what has happened with the vocal fries it started in Los Angeles and then all of a sudden it like transferred its way across to Australia and there are now women in Melbourne and Sydney who are also doing vocal fry. And then actually, if you went to the right school here and you've got a bit of head girl energy and your name is possibly Millie or Imogen, you also have it.

So it's like an STD. And I don't know why it's happening. America is to blame because we watch the TV and films. And I'm presuming, you know, it sort of started in a film there. But vocal fry has infected. It's infected the world. It's like herpes for the throat. Why do you think people do it?

Do you think it's a way of making your voice sound sort of deeper and more authoritative? I think originally, like now I'm doing the Australian version of it but um I think originally um I'm trying to do the American now because I'm got stuck in the Australian one um I think it wasn't a it was a kind of voice that sounded a slight had a slightly more sensual appeal to it like um you know maybe it's a harking it's got more grit to it it's more husky yeah maybe it's a hark back to those kind of like hollywood days of like you know women purring their way through words and kind of yeah like i don't know why like selling sunset has it a little bit as well um but I just catch I find the like how language like or how accents travel and stuff quite fascinating but I

don't I don't know I don't know how and why it's spread to it feels like an affectation it's not like a natural way of you have to stress your voice to get it in there anyway i i'm gonna give it like one star out of five because i find it grating um what have you brought in for us kai so going along that theme actually so kind of similar kind of similar way uh i'm gonna be reviewing mimosas right so i uh remember girlfriend's parents uh recently they're very lovely they're very white they're very posh a lot of vocal fry going on in that conversation um and uh they lived in a place called choro in cornwall i don't know if you've been um genuinely like when i was driving through i felt like i was in that scene from get out or something and uh knocked on the door and her dad was like oh come

in are we trying to make you feel at home uh would you like a mimosa um you know you guys know what a mimosa is right yes yes but working class it's called something else right yeah yeah because i didn't know what it was so i genuinely just assumed that a mimosa um was a mini samosa i was like this old British guy who's going, come in, we're trying to make you feel at home. Here's a bacora or something. I'm like, what is going on? And then, yeah, I had it. Lovely. It's like a, it's like a Fanta that makes you dizzy. And also, the one thing I like about it is like a really acceptable face of day drinking. Like, I feel like if i crapped open a can of stella in the morning it'd be problematic but if i do have a mimosa it's like bougie i think it's

anything that makes daytime drinking culturally acceptable bucks fizz is what is what i wouldn't know it as i don't know whether that's a class and whether posh people call it a mimosa and working class people have a bucks i know it's like orange juice and some sparkly stuff what does it have to be some sort of like champagne or something i don't know it was very good though so i'm gonna give it a four point nine nine out of five oh leaving a little room for improvement there kai i enjoy that and now it's time for your sperm news. This is the news that a team of researchers in England and the US have created. At least they say they've created the world's first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells,

meaning that eventually we could have babies without the need for eggs and sperm, eventually we could have babies without the need for eggs and sperm, which is either the goal or terrifying. Tiff Stevenson, you know what synthetic babies look like. Can you unpack this story for us? Sure. I've had a synthetic baby on set before, actually. I don't know where you guys are with this, but when you're filming TV shows or in a film or whatever, they give you what they call a jelly baby and it's a fake

baby it's a fake baby that you like you know um i had one where we did people just do nothing so it kind of moves like a real so that you don't have a kid on set relentlessly like kind of you sort of got to hold this thing like it's a real baby and they call it a jelly baby um and they are quite terrifying when you look at their faces of course something so delicious it's crazy um yeah i mean let's just erase humans altogether or let's just or just keep having babies till we're in our hundreds look we're at this phase you know we've got pacino de Niro in their 80s doing this in the sequel to Heat that we never saw coming you know just octogenarian Pacino and De Niro chasing each other through

the streets of Los Angeles competing to see who can knock up the most younger women and the heat around the corner is jizz quite literally I feel like we are, we are pushing. It's very interesting actually. Cause when we, when stuff is kind of like pushed in this way, we are, when, when men keep going into their eighties and nineties,

like Bernie Eccleston, you know, in his, in his nineties, still having kids, everyone seems to go like, yeah, like go on.

And when women like are over the age of 40, having babies babies everyone is incredibly incredibly judgmental so this seems to like be like balancing up between like the you know the uh science is quite ageist um but like this is sort of almost making it seem like allowing women to get pregnant for longer because it's less about once you get to a certain age it's less about um whether you'll be able to able to it's about the quality of the egg it's like easter have you got cabris or have you got some crappy store brand like we all know which chocolate is better it's cabris so um so your eggs started to bloom

yeah feels like this is this is an egg hunt we should be doing at Easter. Like the kids can take part in the chocolate one. Let's all go hunting embryos. We're taken to the streets with guns. The terrifying thing here happens long before we get to humanoid, artificially created babies. I think the problem is that there's no clear regulations governing stem cell derived models of human embryos. At the moment there's quite strict

rules on what you can do to human embryos that you create in a lab, but if you're creating them from stem cells there's no rules at all. And so we get into this really horrible ethical quagmire. Yeah that's true but it's also like we don't really have like enough laws for humans making babies either like it still like blows my mind i can have a baby like i can have a human baby i can't have a mortgage but i can somehow have a human baby i feel like there should be some sort of practical and theory test but i was really into this and apparently it's like it's at the very early stages so they don't have like a beating heart uh or a brain so like potentially front running for a toy leadership candidate there um but yeah i just i still feel like i don't know there should be some sort of test for humans some sort of hazard perception test for having a kid just like any sort of red flags just to know just

for you to notice to make sure they don't grow up to be like a prick or something would be good for modern day society I feel. There's also a moral like just an assumption that if you have kids that you're a better person. Well I am. Having kids makes you better. But I was a better person before I had kids I'm just generally. better but i was a better person before i had kids i'm just generally i think there's a lot of sins in the world done in the name of the kids and the mortgage um but also i think this is really interesting if you do have a baby that's written from uh stem cells with no egg or sperm required does that mean they avoid dealing with the baggage of their genetic heritage are they just not going to take after their mother or father and just be a sane human being? That'd be nice.

We're programming them. We're getting close back to the AI again. What's interesting is, you know, like when you can have like, in your placenta and stuff, that's all the stem cells. You can have those sort of harvested now after you have a baby and stuff. And because everything that you need that any illnesses that the baby might have or anyone else in the family can actually be and and you can i think you can do that in the uk and in france they're like no

they they don't want that to happen because i think there was someone who came over from france to do that recently i was i was reading about which is kind of mad like the idea of a woman being able to keep and use anything from her like that it's been built out of a woman's body and then they're like no it's unethical for you to have this have this thing that came out of your own body the idea that it's unethical for women to be able to utilize something that that kind of seems crazy to me I'm like if you grew the placenta as well as you grew the baby why can't you use that it's like nature's medicine cabinet and now spotify news now this is podcasting news and news in the world of harry and megan which we

don't normally cover on the gargle here we We normally tend to avoid those stories, not for any real reason other than that I don't know why I should care about some random from a show that I don't watch marrying Meghan Markle. So we've avoided this until now. But apparently, after signing a $20 million deal with Spotify to make a podcast, Harry and Meghan are jumping out of the deal after making only 12 episodes. Kai Samra, you're on a podcast. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes, like I said, this is sort of our Spotify executive called Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

grifters. Now, I should probably say at this point, I'm quite thick. So I didn't know what a grifter was. I'm going to Google it now. now so basically it's like a grifter is a person who engages in petty or small scale swindling and i'm like he's part of the royal family he's been in he's been pretty involved in mass scale swindling for a number of decades do you want to be like be like be surprised that a member of the royal family just taking your money and offered nothing back he's like being surprised like the dodgy skunk you bought from your local dealer doesn't come with a returns policy it's obviously it's not going to happen um but to be fair i'm similar to you alice like i feel like working in the comedy industry just like one less podcast hosted by like a rich nepo baby can only be a good thing to be honest

um but yeah i'm the same i'd like i don't know how i feel about printer i don't know about youtube i don't know i just feel like i hated him and then i don't know it's just something like he's wearing like nazi outfits and then suddenly he's like married megal and he's like he's just split a pin i feel like people on the left like all comedians love him it's like really split and i don't know how to feel about it to be honest with you the book was really upsetting and ruined elizabeth arden's eight hour cream for me forever after he talked about putting it on his penis i'm like this was one of my go-to products and now i've got to think about your penis and the and the ghost of your mother weirdly the ghost of how it reminded you of your mother um i think it's like

you gave them the money that's what i kind of think of the, like, calling them grifters as if, like, giving people purely because they have royal titles and a certain level of fame without any knowledge that they can back that up with any decent content isn't on the platform as well. I find that interesting. I'm like, oh, you're calling them grifters? Well, what are you then if you're just, like, throwing 20 million

at people who don't have a track record of making this stuff? Spotify have made a whole business just grifting on other artists, to be fair. So I'm kind of glad in one way it's happened.

I'm like, the grifters have become the grifted. Yes. That probably doesn't even make sense. I only learned the word about 10 minutes ago. The grifty. The grifter.

I'm not going to come in left field and say that it's Spotify's fault for not giving them a good producer because as somebody who allegedly makes a weekly podcast i know that it is like 99 the work of the producers in getting something done and i just show up and say my stupid jokes and then all of the magic is done behind the scenes uh so you know i feel like this is entirely spotify's fault this is uh it is like giving someone a horse but not a saddle. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's hard to feel sorry for people

when they've got a lot of money, you know, when their complaints and their very nice lifestyle. But at the same time, I do sort of feel that they're between a rock and the hard place and i don't know which one is the hard place and which one is the rock yeah so i only just started watching succession and i was like i'm not gonna feel sorry for any of these posh white people and i suddenly got into it so i don't make a pressin of it and apply that to prince harry as well now i feel like that's a one-off well i mean the good thing now is you

can listen to his entire back catalog in under a day particularly if you do it at two and a half speed so uh you know it's 12 episodes of podcast and i think they will probably not keep the 20 million dollars i'm sure that the deal that they made would have some kind of if you don't if you only show out 12 episodes of the podcast then you don't get to keep the 2020 million. Otherwise, that is an extremely well-paid podcast and almost as well-paid as I am. Oh, no, I think they'll get to keep it. For the amount of publicity, that's the sign-on.

That's the deal. That's what Spotify have done. You give them the money. You can't then turn around and go, oh, actually, we've changed our minds. And also, the risk like a libel case. Didn't like Phoebe Waller-Bridge get like 20 million from Amazon or something

and then didn't really produce much. Wow. Not trying to throw everyone in the bus. No, no, no. But also that's interesting because just because we, so I was reading about this and I was like, oh yeah, that sounds like a lot of money. But just because we haven't seen it, the and i was like oh yeah that sounds like a

lot of money but just because we haven't seen it the content doesn't mean it's not being produced so that doesn't mean that scripts weren't being made and then being binned off or not agreed to be good enough or pilots being made and stuff being and so half the time i think when these huge deals happen it is also partially about uh taking these people off the market for anyone else to be able to to use so spotify going we want harry and megan and we don't want anyone else to have them and amazon are going we want phoebe waller bridge because if we if if amazon don't come in and do the deal then apple are going to pay her a shit ton of money so sometimes it's about taking people out of the marketplace and and and so that you can kind of go, oh, look, this is the jewel in our sparkly crown.

And also, to be fair, at this point, who would not be willing to pay just a f***ing ton of money for less content? And Apple News now. And this is the news that Apple is taking on apples. That is to say, Apple, the business, is in conflict with the fruit for its trademark shape being an apple shape. Tiff Stevenson, you keep doctors awake and you unpack this story for us. So Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland. And apparently it's one of 12 countries where it's flexing its legal muscles apple is suing a swiss company because they've got a logo which is a white

apple on a on a red background it doesn't even have the bite mark out of it but you can't you can't own apples that's like trying to say you own the sky or clouds and i think if anyone has a claim on that it's probably magrete um i Magritte's got a good claim on apples as well. Son of man, that's an apple in the face. And what I like to do, I actually went to the Magritte Museum. And what I like to do is lean over someone's shoulder and whisper, this is not a Magritte. Which is a great art joke if you're into Magritte.

But yes, so Apple are trying to say they own the image rights to Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's kid. Anything to do with Apple's that they are going to sue for copyright infringement, which, like I say, feels insane. Yeah, they seem to be trying to secure it in Switzerland, but not just that very iconic bitten apple shape. They seem to be going after every kind of variation of apple. It's weird. It's like I feel like it's not a coincidence that it's like because they're bringing out that new Vision Pro virtual reality headset. I think they're just going to start like everyone's going to have one and they're just going to start sponsoring just any inanimate object or a living thing. You know, like you see like a black horse and you just see it's sponsored by Lloyd's TSB or like a puppy Labrador sponsored by Andrix,

that sort of thing. But then I went on like a little rabbit hole on this and apparently, because I was like, why is that their logo? And apparently it's because like Alan Turing, who's supposed to be like the father of modern day computing, died because he ate an apple laced with cyanide.

And I'm like, that's such a weird thing to have like the founder kind of father of your industry like the logo being the thing that killed it and i kind of realized that's what christianity does with the cross so i'm not really so maybe it wasn't the first one to be fair but yeah i think we're sat in like a dangerous precedent with this and i feel like with virtual reality it's going to go it's just going to go to the moon everything's going to be sponsored everything you say all sponsorship on the moon i know who do you which corporations you reckon is going to get the moon uh i think tampax because the moon and uh you know cycles just 28 day cycles i think definitely if anyone should if anyone should sponsor the moon, it should be a period product.

I've just watched Wallace and Gromit, so I was going to say cheddar cheese. That's how different we are. That is how different our perspectives are. Over the past couple of years, Apple has gone after a meal prepping app that has a pear logo, a singer-songwriter named Frankie Pineapple, a German cycling route,

a pair of stationery makers, and a school district that used an Apple as its logo, among others. It's also fought a decades-long battle with the Beatles music label, which was called Apple Corps, which was finally resolved in 2007. And I feel like here we have an instance of people who are being paid a lot of money, which is to say the legal department of Apple in the copyright area, who should just sit back and not you know like i feel

like this is a harry like this is a harry and megan job give harry and megan this job and uh just let them sit on their hands because this seems completely deranged yeah i think i'm actually thinking about i think like those synthetic babies definitely sponsored by jelly baby i think in 2010 apparently they got a very small swiss grocers cooperative to enter an out-of-court agreement a binding out-of-court agreement declaring that they would never add a bite mark to their logo of an apple wow just man so it's the it's the biting it's the biting of something that they're trying to that's uh you can the apple, but not if someone's taking a bite out of it. I think they're just trying it on.

I think genuinely, I think they're just anything that even, you know, dings the artificial intelligence capture sensor that might look like an apple is coming in within their remit. And they're just going to hunt it down because they've got the money. Why not? Yeah. So that's where it feels like the David and Golioliath kind of I think that happened with the well I know it happened with the Glee Clubs because in fact I did a show for them uh after they won I think they won

their court case so the Glee Comedy Clubs had been four years running under the name the Glee Clubs and then there was a TV show in America called Glee Club. And so they were like, no, we own this name. And I think they came along way after the clubs. So that went to a whole, you know, went through a whole copyright trademark sort of battle over who really owns Glee, Gleefully. Gleefully doing stuff.

I think the only people who really own Glee are three-year-olds. Just a three-year-old with chocolate smears around their mouth and an innocent look on their face. I think those are the only people who are really morally entitled to the word glee. A freshly painted wall nearby that a handprint can go directly on. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. I'm flipping through the ads at the back.

Kai, have you got anything to plug? Probably my next show, I'm going to LA, so I'm going to tune my ears to that vocal fry that I've heard. So, yeah, I'm doing the Dinosaur Tidebriar next month, and that's probably the next show I'm doing. So if anybody out there is in LA, I need to sell tickets. The thing to do is add more airiness and breathiness to your vocal fry so that you can get vocal air fryer.

Tiff, have you got anything to plug? I will be at the Fringe for one week doing a work in progress. So that's at the Monkey Barrel at 12 from the 14th to the 20th. And I'm also doing Falmouth's Cringe Festival. And if you haven't listened, then you should be checking out Catharsis, my podcast on the Bugle Network with lots of fantastic guests.

Do check that out. It's an excellent podcast. I have both been on it and listened to it, which is unusual. I rarely listen to podcasts that I'm on. We have a live gargle at the Edinburgh Fringe on the 15th and the 22nd of August if you want to come up and watch this happen in real life

Also I'll be doing my show in Edinburgh I am Alice Fraser Find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser where I do my weekly writers meetings If you'd like to come and write with me on a Sunday we have a writers' meeting and a workshop. So that's a fun thing that you can do. And at the moment, I still haven't figured out how much I should charge for them.

So you get four a month for a dollar a month, which feels like not enough money. But take advantage of that. Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. This is a Bugle podcast, an 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.